


The Last Kidnapping

by joanhello



Category: Megamind (2010)
Genre: Adventure & Romance, Alien Culture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cussing, F/M, Fluff, Mutilation, Public Nudity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:13:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 45,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23252260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joanhello/pseuds/joanhello
Summary: The Master of All Villainy and his henchfish get a message from a group of fellow survivors of the destruction of their homeworld, inviting them to leave Earth and join a colony. But can Megamind just leave Roxanne behind? And what about their fellow alien, Metro Man? (Despite the rating, there's only one chapter with a smutty bit.)
Relationships: Megamind & Minion, Megamind/Roxanne Ritchi, Metro Man & Roxanne Ritchi, Minion & Roxanne Ritchi
Comments: 11
Kudos: 29





	1. Chapter 1

Up until the bag came off, it was like a typical kidnapping. The noseful of knockout spray, the foggy feeling of the furry mechanical arm catching her as she fell, coming to in a chair with her wrists and ankles tied and light coming through the stinky bag, and then its sudden removal, bringing fresh (if cold and dank) air and the sight of a bank of electronic equipment, dark except for the blinky dials. The only thing she expected to see that she didn't was the swivel chair.

  
"Megamind?" she spoke into the room.

"I'm here, Ms. Ritchi." His voice came from behind her.

"What's going on? This isn't the way you usually do things."

"I know. I... have something to say that is going to be very difficult. Please bear with me." There was a long moment of silence before he spoke again. "Minion and I have always believed that, with the destruction of our home planet, the rest of our people died, that the two of us were the only survivors, the last of our kind. Then, just last night, we received a message from a group of fellow survivors. They were in space at the time our sun was destroyed and they managed to escape the system. They've found a suitable uninhabited planet about ten light years away and established a colony. They found out about us when they deciphered video signals coming from Earth. They've invited us to join them. Sent plans for a hyperdrive starship that we could build in about a month, that could get us there in a few hours, subjective time. We could be done with this awful planet where we'll never be accepted, where the best we can hope to be is villains."

She felt as if she'd been punched in the stomach. "So," she began, carefully controlling her voice, "this is goodbye?"

"Not necessarily. I... I love you. There. I said it. I love you and the thought that I'd never see you again, except on a screen, was enough to cast the whole project into doubt. But I won't stay if our relationship consists of this, of kidnapping and banter. If you return my feelings, if you even think you might come to return them, then I will stay. Minion can go. This world has been a far harder place for him than for me. It will be painful to say goodbye to him, but if you will be mine, then I will stay and do my very, very best to be what you need, whatever that turns out to be."

"You would pass up this chance just for me?"

"I would. Choose, Ms. Ritchi. I place my fate in your hands."

How could she make that choice? If she sent him away, the fantasies she'd had about him over the years would never come true. She'd never find out how he kissed or what was under that skin-tight costume of his. She'd never hear his voice or feel the warm tingle when he leaned close or see the glow of his inhumanly green eyes. But on the other hand, how could she deny him this experience that was both a homecoming and an adventure into the unknown, a new world among the stars, a life of continual learning and challenge that would finally be adequate to his brilliance? It would be a better life than he could ever have on Earth, a more exciting life than she'd ever know herself, and if she kept him from it, she'd never quite forgive herself. Suddenly the decision was clear.

"Take me with you."

"What?!" He finally came around where she could see him, scrambling, almost tripping as he turned to face her. He looked as astonished as he sounded.

"Take me with you. I want to see this new planet. With you."

"Roxanne, you would actually give up all the acclaim of the populace, the success you've enjoyed here, to come with me?"

"Hey, my career is about over. I'm twenty-eight and I know they're shopping around for someone younger to replace me. I'm not that close to my relatives and my work has really been my whole life. Between sinking into obscurity, missing you and envying you for this awesome adventure you're going to be having, I just can't see my future life on Earth being that hard to give up."

"But aren't you afraid that my people won't accept you any more than yours has accepted me?"

"You come from a more advanced civilization. I'm going to trust that. Hey, could you ask them about their marriage customs? I want to do this right."

The look of amazement and joy that came over his face was something she'd cherish in memory all her life. He dashed behind her, untied her wrists, then came back around, knelt down and freed her ankles. As he straightened up, she found her arms going around him of their own accord. He embraced her in turn.

"Let's not wait for them. We're in Metro City, so we'll use the local method. Roxanne Ritchi, will you marry me _this week_?"

"Yes," she said and leaned in for a kiss.

One kiss led to another, deeper one, then to nuzzling of ears and throats and collarbones, which led to Roxanne calling a halt.

"Stop. I'm not on the pill or anything."

"No, you're right. Excuse me a moment." He turned his back on her and adjusted something in front of himself. "There," he said, turning back around. "The protective gear built into this costume is very effective at minimizing the effect of a blow to the crotch, but it can make getting an erection very uncomfortable. And before we go any further, we should tell Minion." They both rose and went, hand in hand, into the next room, where the fish was online.

"Minion, prepare to be amazed. Roxanne wants to come with us! And she proposed!" The fish was properly amazed. He floated open-mouthed, his eyes going back and forth between his boss and their longtime kidnappee for a long moment, with occasional stops at their interlaced hands.

"Ms. Ritchi? Did the boss give you an injection, or something to eat or drink or..."

"No, he didn't drug me. I'm totally in my right mind. And I'm totally sure that this is the right decision."

"But...but what about Metro Man?"

"He's not my boyfriend. He never was. It was a misunderstanding that we let stand because it was convenient for us. But I'm not jilting him, so he has no right to object."

"He may not have the right, but he's gonna do it anyway. Just wait."

###

The first person Roxanne told was the person in her life most likely to take it well: her hard-drinking Great-Aunt Louise, her grandfather's black sheep younger sister, who had spent thirty years as an archaeologist in the Southwest, married into the Hopi tribe for a while, and was spending her retirement years as an activist working to prevent commercial exploitation of traditionally sacred land. She was seldom in Metro City anymore. Roxanne called her at her home in Taos. The older woman reacted with enthusiasm, told her how lucky she was, then said "You have to talk to Karen Slausson. She's an ethnobotanist. We went to the U of M together and she's back there now, on the faculty. While I was digging up abandoned pueblos out here, she was wandering around in the Orinoco basin, getting shamans to tell her what herbs they use for the tropical diseases that still had our doctors scratching their heads. She'll have a ton of advice for adapting to a new culture, and she'll be impressed as hell. I'll email her your contact info." After finding and reciting Professor Slausson's contact information, Louise had one more piece of advice. "Before you take off for good, make your blue boyfriend teach you how to drive that starship. If things turn ugly on that new planet, you need to be able to come back to this one, even if nobody you know now will still be around."

###

"They're just leaving?" Roxanne was only at the beginning of telling Metro Man, and he was already upset.

"I would think you'd be happy about it."

"I can see that this is a good thing for the city, if it's true, but I'm skeptical. Megamind's capabilities as a villain are all based on trickery, deception and outright lies. He told you all this while you were tied up in his lair, helpless and therefore easily influenced. There's no reason to think he wouldn't lie to you in order to further his latest plot against the city."

"Oh? And what kind of plot would that be?"

They were on Roxanne's balcony. The hero scowled in the general direction of the industrial district, thinking, before he answered. "A rocket and a missile look pretty similar. If we all thought he was leaving, we might let him build a missile right here in the city, only to find him using it to terrorize us. You might find yourself strapped to the nosecone."

"So you're not going to let him build it."

"Not if there's anything I can do to prevent it. Obviously if he went to the trouble of recruiting you, he needs us to let him build it because it won't be as easily hidden as his devices usually are. If he thinks this deception is enough to lull me into complacency, he's wrong."

Now it was Roxanne's turn to scowl into the distance. "I'll tell him. If you're right, he'll probably abandon his plot without too much argument. If you're wrong... I'm not sure what he'll do. Try to figure out some way to build his space ship that won't look like a potential threat to the city."

"Tell him? Did he give you his phone number?"

"Yeah. Wayne, I- There's something else you should know. When he told me all this... I asked him to take me with him, and he said yes."

"What?!" The hero looked at her is if she'd grown a second head. "You'd just leave the city, leave Earth forever, to be with his people?"

"Think about it, Wayne. No one has ever had a research opportunity like this. No astronaut has gone any farther than the Moon. I'd be the first to set foot on another planet, in another star system, the first to observe an extraterrestrial society. How could I pass up a chance like this? If it's true. You've raised enough doubts that I'm not sure anymore." She looked down a moment, then looked at him. He looked like he was about to say something, something angry, and then he just took off into the air.

_He's too upset to stay and I didn't even tell him about the engagement. If I'd told him that, he might have really blown his top._ She went inside to check her email again, to see if Professor Slausson had tried to reach her. _If Wayne's right and Megamind was lying all along, I'll feel like the biggest fool on Earth._


	2. Chapter 2

Billy Bob McCracken had been three years into a thirty-year sentence when he'd seen a tiny spacecraft fall into the exercise yard at Metro City Prison for the Criminally Gifted. He'd been wire-thin then, and athletic enough to keep up with the new guys on the basketball court. Now he was puffy and got around in, well, not a wheelchair anymore. The blue infant who'd been in that craft had grown into an inventor a century ahead of the rest of the world. When Billy Bob had been released, in failing health, the inventor had built him a chair that floated in the air, like his brainbots did. In it, the old man could go out into the swamp, the same as he used to when he was a boy, rifle at the ready and senses alert for game, legal or otherwise. It was, in Billy Bob's opinion, a damned sight better than sitting around the house watching TV while his divorced granddaughter, who got a regular check from the government for taking care of him, did the housework. He was always glad when the blue inventor and his talking fish pal, who still called him Uncle, came out for a visit.

For that very same reason, he was not happy with the news they had this time. It meant they'd be going for good. So, without being obvious about it, he was trying to discouraged them. They were sitting on the porch, the two men with bottles of Billy Bob's homebrew on their chair arms. They'd been out shooting at things earlier, but had come home empty-handed, so Darlene (the granddaughter) was making sandwiches.

"Well, what if they've got some religion they want you to sign up for? You boys ain't never been much for religion."

"This will be a civilization of superintelligent people," replied Megamind. "Any religion they have, I would probably have no quarrel with."

"Well, what if none o' them blue women like you? What if they think you're too Earthified?"

"In the woman department, I'll be bringing my own."

"What you mean, boy?"

"It's Ms. Ritchi," said Minion. "She wants to marry the boss and come with us."

"That little gal you kidnap all the time?"

"That's the one."

"And she wants to?" Billy Bob sounded doubtful.

"It was her idea," replied Megamind. "I thought she'd either bid me goodbye or beg me not to go. She more or less ordered me to take her along. Amazing woman. I'll never be bored with her."

"And what if them blue women didn't like her none?" Darlene chose this moment to come out with the food. "Darlene, honey, you call up your gal friends every day, doncha? Tell these boys how important it is for a woman to have other women to understand 'em." As he spoke, he slid out the little table that stood between his chair and Minion's, so she could put the platter on it.

The young woman stood up and faced them. She was used to the aliens and spoke to them without fear. "It's not that a good man isn't important," she said. "But there are some things a woman needs to talk over with other women. Maybe not face to face, but at least on the phone or in email. Is there some way she's gonna be able to phone home after she gets there?"

"Er, no," Megamind admitted. "The physics of faster-than-light travel dictate that, even though we will age less than a day in the course of the journey, from the point of view of someone on a planet, it will take ten years, and that applies to messages as well as to people. But I am not worried. Roxanne is a very brave and resourceful woman, and expert at winning hearts. I refuse to believe that she will not have friends of both sexes within a year or two of our arrival."

He would have gone on, but Darlene gave a little gasp. "Did you say Roxanne, like Roxanne Ritchi who's on Channel Eight News?"

"The very same," replied the blue man.

"Yeep! I gotta tell Sally Ray. She won't believe it!" As she squealed out her words, Darlene went running back inside.

"It might not happen," her grandfather shouted after her. "That's what we're discussin'."

"But you're talkin' about it," her voice came from inside the house, "and that _is_ happenin'." They could hear the beeps of a phone being dialed.

"Darlene," shouted Billy Bob in a warning tone. She ignored him. With a look of resignation, he said "Well, boys, your secret's out, at least among the redneck gal segment o' the population. Nuthin' we can do about it now, so we might as well dig in." He picked up half a sandwich. His guests did the same.

###

Metro Man rose from Roxanne's balcony in as much of a rage as the superpowered hero ever allowed himself. He zoomed over the industrial district, searching. There was a trick to seeing through one of Megamind's holographic illusions, but he had to know it was an illusion first. Doing it for every building on the peninsula, pausing long enough at each to really understand what he was seeing, would take all day and part of the night and would give him a blinding headache that would take days to go away. So he skimmed, glancing into known former lairs and other likely spots, less to actually find the blue villain than to give his outward self something to do, to burn off energy while he sorted out his feelings. After twenty minutes in the air, he arrived at an inner clarity and was surprised to realize that it had nothing to do with Roxanne. _Why him and not me? Why his people and not mine?_ He knew there was much more footage of him out there than of Megamind because he had battled other threats, performed rescues, given interviews and received public honors. It had all been videotaped and had gone streaming out into the galaxy along with the rest of the world's broadcast television signals. So either none of his people had survived (which seemed to him very unlikely) or some had survived but hadn't looked at video transmissions from Earth, or they had looked, had seen him, and had decided, for whatever reason, not to contact him.

That was the thing that got him in the gut, the possibility that his people, of whom he knew absolutely nothing, had looked down from up there and had not found him worthy. It was as if, after all these years of rivalry, the little blue kid had won after all. Without realizing it, he'd left the industrial district. He was out over the lake, nothing but water between him and the horizon. He turned around. He was far enough out that he could see the city as a whole, glittering in the sunlight, its skyline coming to an elegant point at the top of Metro Tower. When he got up this morning, he'd been proud of this city, proud of his role in it. Now it looked like the booby prize.

This was crazy. He pulled back from himself, enough to take a more objective look at the situation. Megamind was going to an unknown culture, to a place he really didn't know anything about, where he'd be starting all over. He might succeed there where he'd failed here, or he might fuck up again, or he might not be anything special one way or another. There was no way to know whether he'd really have a better life there. The thrill of being chosen would fade, probably within a week or two of his arrival, and after that it would just be life, with an extra dose of painful adjustments and misunderstandings. He'd get used to the good parts, struggle with the bad parts, same as in any life. He'd just be doing it without Wayne Scott. That was the bottom of it, he realized. On an uninhabited world, in a pioneering society, his powers would be even more valuable than they were here, but apparently it hadn't occurred to Megamind to lay aside the old rivalry and ask him to come along. He'd rather take Roxie - take the damsel, for crying out loud. Not that Wayne would go. He knew where his loyalties lay. The city depended on him. But not even being asked, that really stung.

###

One of the things that had made Roxanne pretty sure that Megamind had not been lying to her was that he'd driven her home without even a blindfold. On the way out, he'd stopped just outside the building so she could look back and see where the secret entrance was, and then told her the address, so she could come and go as she pleased. She decided to go in person to tell them about the conversation with Metro Man.

No one was there. Well, some brainbots were floating around, but neither of the aliens, nor the Invisible Car. On the other hand, in the garage area there was a roughly round metal object, about three feet across, that hadn't been there when she'd last seen the place. On closer examination, she realized that it was a geodesic, made of flat five-sided panels, and was pitted and scratched on all sides like...like the retired asteroid belt probe she'd seen in the Air and Space Museum when she'd visited Washington, DC. Megamind had said they'd received a message. He hadn't said how they'd received it. Maybe it had come in this.

She couldn't see any buttons, but there was a slightly darker shape, like a hand print, in the middle of one of the panels. Below it were some little arrangements of short spiky lines that looked like they might be writing. She put her hand on it. Immediately she heard something move on the far side of the little round... thing? What would you call it? Light emerged and suddenly there was a hologram about ten feet beyond it, of a fish, rather like Minion but not exactly, apparently floating in midair. It spoke, not in any language Roxanne was familiar with, for a couple of minutes. Then it vanished, replaced by a virtual screen showing the Milky Way galaxy. The view zoomed in on one particular arm of the spiral, stopping when it showed a cluster of stars in the center, with several isolated stars around it. Then the cluster went dark as pale lines streaked away from it in all directions. The view panned down, following two of those lines, nearly parallel, gradually separating until they each stopped at another star. There was a pause with those two stars in the upper left and lower right corners of the screen. For a moment, Megamind's face and Minion in the dome of his gorilla body were visible above the lower right star. Then the view zoomed in on the other star. It became a star system with multiple orbiting planets. Closer focus on the second planet, which had a large moon. Closer and closer, swinging around to the night side where a single light showed on the surface, suddenly a complex multi-lobed orbiting habitat came into view, three-dimensional and seeming to intrude into the space of the lair. All this time, the fish's voice continued to speak in the strange language.

A hatch became visible on one side of the habitat. The view approached it and it opened, letting her see the inside of an airlock. Then, inside the airlock, the view reoriented itself, rotating as well as turning right. If Roxanne had really been there, she'd have ended up standing on the door she'd just come through, facing a second door. It opened and a corridor was revealed, being used by blue bald people, fish in mechanical bodies (bare metal, completely robotic-looking) and bots that floated or rolled. There was gravity, apparently. Then there was a series of scenes of work being done: in a greenhouse, in a machine room, underwater in a shellfish bed, in a repair bay off a hangar.

During this sequence, the Invisible Car rolled up. Roxanne turned and waved at it but stayed where she was. She had no idea how to pause the projection and she was fascinated by what she was seeing. Minion went off in the direction of the kitchen with something in a plastic bag. Megamind came up beside her, took her hand, and began to translate. "There's a regularly scheduled shuttle between the orbiter and the colony every six days, but additional trips are common. Functions are gradually being moved down onto the surface as the colony is developed." The scene shifted to an open swimming pool, where a couple of dozen naked blue people of all ages were hanging out, eating, drinking and talking as if around a pool on Earth. "As this is being recorded, children are still born, reared and trained in orbit, going to the surface only when they are able to fully contribute." The view returned to the hangar, where a craft like a small jet airplane was being guided out the door, toward the planet (Earthlike except that the shapes of the continents were different).

The next shot was of a gleaming geodesic dome on the shore of a wide body of water. Around it were cleared fields, with forest at the edges. There was a dock extending out into the water. The little jet flew in, circled the dome once, then appeared to stop in midair and levitate down. "The name of the settlement is First Seed. It's occupied mainly by researchers developing crop plant species. It also serves as a base of operations for explorers and prospectors." The scene shifted again, to the dock, where two blue people looked down into the water. A fish rose to the surface and spoke to them. "Large bodies of fresh water have proven particularly fecund in the area of edible native species." Scene shift again, to an underwater hillside where large snails are being harvested by a bot that looks like a submarine with arms while a fish of Minion's species supervises. "Our great limit," Megamind continued, "particularly in this area, is technological. All the devices controllable by Minion's species were brought with us. We are unable to build more due to loss of the technological infrastructure needed for making certain parts. It's a serious problem for the new generation. We can give them the modification that will allow them to control these machines, but we cannot build more as our population increases. However, you seem to have built at least one of those devices, even though our analysis of Earth's stage of advancement shows that it doesn't have that infrastructure, either. So if nothing else, we ask that you send us an explanation of how you did it. We would honor your name as long as our civilization lasts." The scene shifted again, back to the fish she'd seen at the beginning, still speaking. "Additionally, if you, yourselves, are willing to join us, we would be glad to have you. Our numbers are barely enough to avoid inbreeding. We are perpetually short-handed. Plans for a basic hyperdrive ship are included in this transmission. To access them, press index, pinkie, thumb and then upper palm. We wish you courage in these difficult times." The display shut down as he finished speaking.

They turned to each other. Megamind was about to ask Roxanne what she thought, but then he saw a very strong emotion on her face, or maybe a mixture of emotions. Suddenly she flung her arms around him and kissed him so hard, he had to take a step back to avoid falling over. After the initial surprise, he happily responded in kind.

"I take it you liked what you saw," he said when they came up for air.

"When you kidnapped me that last time, to tell me you loved me, you had already seen that whole thing, including those naked blue women."

"Er, oh. Yes. In fact, it was only after I'd seen them, and found my feelings for you as strong as ever, that I decided to kidnap you. I seem to have imprinted on your kind." He smiled at her fondly. "I'm so glad you're coming."

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

"Well, it's a good thing we aren't building a rocket, isn't it?"

The bag Minion carried in from the car contained gifts from Uncle Billy Bob: venison sausage from a deer he'd shot several months ago, and eggs from Darlene's backyard flock. The sausage had thawed while they drove home and Minion was now making an afternoon breakfast. Roxanne and Megamind sat at the lair's kitchen table, enjoying the delectable smells. She had just filled him in on the conversation with Metro Man.

"How can you go into space without a rocket?"

"Rocketry is the way NASA does it because they don't have the antigravity technology, or the robotics, to send up the parts and do the assembly in orbit. We had been assembling a weapon up there, to use on Metro Mahn. Now we'll be cannibalizing it to build our starship. On the last day, we'll each get into a little sealed compartment and let the brainbots haul us up there. The only thing we need to do to stop Wayne from interfering is to disguise everything. Perhaps," he put his hands together in front of him, the fingers spread wide, "we'll create a fictional weather research project that will be releasing several large balloons from a local roof every day. He can search in vain for a disguised rocketry project. Actually, we can use real balloons for the first leg of the journey. The brainbots can recharge at the Death Ray and pick them up when they get to the top of their range."

"Death Ray?"

"Oh, that's the orbiting weapon. It's actually a giant version of the Destroy setting on my ray gun, but I decided to call it the Death Ray for reasons of style. It's turned out to be very convenient that we've got an orbiting platform in place, with batteries that have been charging for months. Won't have to worry about getting fuel up there. It will also allow us to send a message ahead of ourselves, to let them know we're coming. Mainly to let them know _you're_ coming. Even if the message arrives only a few days before we do, that will give everyone a little time to get used to the idea of you being part of the package, so to speak."

Minion set a plate of fried sausage and a plate of scrambled eggs in the middle of the table, then sat on a low stool on one side. It was just the right height to put his face at the same level as theirs. Three places were already set. They helped themselves and dug in.

Roxanne took one bite of the sausage, then stared at her fork. "What seasonings does your uncle use in this?"

Minion answered. "Poultry seasoning, basically, with a little extra pepper and a dash of Worcestershire sauce."

"Ever have venison before?" Megamind asked.

"Yeah. I've had it in restaurants, but it wasn't like this."

"Restaurant venison has been fed cattle feed, so it tastes almost like beef. Uncle Billy Bob makes a big deal of the superiority of wild venison which has browsed the woodlands."

"Yeah, that's how it tastes: wild."

"Wild food, or crops only a few decades removed from the wild, are most of the diet on our destination world."

She thought about that as she started chewing again. "You know, it's funny how certain things that are obvious never cross my mind until they're right in my face. I'm just now realizing that, once we go, I'll probably never have American food again."

"Not necessarily," Minion responded, raising a steel finger. "I've been collecting a few species to bring along: seeds, bread yeast, mushroom spores. I've ordered fertile coffee beans. I'm trying to talk the boss into adding a module for a flock of chickens, but he's not sure how well they'd do in zero gee. Plus dried seasonings and stuff, just enough to kind of fake American flavors using their plants and meats. Plus basic recipes."

"Wow. You're gonna be a regular Johnny Appleseed, aren't you?"

"Hey, that's what pioneers do, isn't it? They know they're not coming back, so they bring as much good stuff from their old life as they can."

"But I'm surprised you aren't going to just dehydrate the chickens. In fact, why aren't you bringing dehydrated cattle and pigs, too?"

Megamind answered. "Dehydration only works in a decent gravitational field. We found that out when we first started building the Death Ray. When we got to about one twentieth gee, they popped right back out into their original form. So bringing any animal species will require building a habitat for them, and bringing supplies, not just for the journey, but for the time afterward while we're trying to figure out how to keep them alive on the fodder of our destination world. Which we might not be able to do. I will miss coffee with cream, but not so much that I'm willing to quadruple our preparation time while we work out the details of livestock maintenance."

"Well, what about just bringing a couple of big coolers full of frozen meat and milk and stuff? We'll thaw it out and feed it to people and they can decide whether it's worth building habitats and making the twenty year round trip for seed stock."

"You're absolutely right. Minion, why didn't we think of that?"

Minion shrugged.

When the meal was over, as brainbots lifted away their dishes, Megamind said "I've worked out how we can be legally married without my being immediately arrested. Minion! On my marco." They both stood and touched their wrists. Megamind had a watch there; Minion just had a button built into his suit. "Marco..."

"Polo," said the fish. Their outlines blurred into vague bluish shapes, then reformed... different. Two men now stood before her. Two human men. Megamind was still short and thin, with black curly hair and a "black Irish" complexion, very pale with the blue veins showing through. He was wearing a tuxedo with a sapphire stud fastening the shirt collar. Minion was a little less tall than in his true form, tanned and athletic-looking, with a blond crew cut. He was in a navy blue business suit. Roxanne gaped in astonishment. "And look," continued her fiancé, galloping to a drawer. "Picture IDs." He pulled out two completely official-looking driver's licenses and showed them to her. The one with the photo that matched Minion's disguise gave his name as Ronald Waterman. The other had Megamind's disguise in the photo and his legal name, John Smith.

"This is amazing," she said, "but everyone knows that's your name."

"Everyone in Metrocity, you mean. I was thinking we'd take the Evil Jetboat to Wolf Lake."

Indiana, which does not require a waiting period between the issuing of a marriage license and the wedding, adjoins two states that do have waiting periods, Michigan and Illinois. A few Indiana jurisdictions have taken advantage of this legal disparity to develop "quickie wedding" industries similar to the one in Las Vegas, and none catered more enthusiastically to impatient couples than the dying industrial town of Wolf Lake, just across the state line from greater Chicago. In addition to a 24-hour county clerk's office and a medical testing lab that would do the required blood test in fifteen minutes, there were several chapels for tying the knot, hotels for consummating the union, and nightclubs for celebrating, featuring a variety of musical styles, all in a few lakefront blocks. It was perfect: they could be wed in style while being anonymous in a crowd of couples, and it was close enough to home that they could be back by morning with no one the wiser.

That was when she realized that Megamind intended for them to do this tonight. She asked for a little privacy with her fiancé, saying that she had something very private to tell him. Minion immediately announced that he had to go look for something downstairs and disappeared.

"Listen, sweetie," she said as soon as they were alone. "There's something you should know. These," she gestured at her bosom, "are falsies. I'm really only an A cup."

"Oh, that. Yes, we know that."

"Really? They're top of the line. I was told when I bought them that they'd be undetectable."

"To the eye, yes, but after the third or fourth kidnapping, we started to worry that you'd take to wearing a transmitter, so we installed a scanner in the back seat of the Invisible Car to detect anything concealed in your clothing. That's when found the, er, falsies. But since we're giving advance notice, did you observe, when you watched the message, how the men were, er, endowed?"

"Yeah, I did." It had looked like the penises had no shafts at all, just the heads coming directly out from the torsos. "I assume that it, ah, grows?"

"Oh, yes. Once aroused, I am indistinguishable from a human male in the dark."

She smiled at that, and moved closer. "Unless somebody touches your head." He still had the disguise generator turned on. She pressed close, put her hand up to the black curls, and her expression changed to surprise. "This feels like real hair. How'd you do that?"

"Manipulation of the object-environment space-time interface. It's basically shapeshifting."

"Huh. Well, can you feel it when I do this?" She ran her fingers through his hair as she spoke.

"I feel a strange tickling sensation on my scalp, which I rather like, probably because it's you doing it." He leaned in to kiss her, but she held back.

"Could you shut that thing off so I can kiss the real you?"

  
  



	4. Chapter 4

"I don't dare be seen buying a white dress. I'm liable to be recognized."

"Oh, but you don't have to. Look." Megamind gave his watch a twist. It produced a faint ray of blue light, too faint to notice if she hadn't been looking for it, that passed over her body, head to foot. "There. You're scanned in. Now we send the image to the main computer." He did something to a button on the watch, then dashed around to the control center. He worked at one of the keyboards for a moment and one of the screens changed from a view of the sidewalk outside the lair to an image of Roxanne in the same clothes she was wearing. "Now all we need to do is change the head." More keys clicked and a second screen switched from a security camera image, this time showing a grid of a dozen feminine heads. The one in the upper right had a green background, the others blue. "I think this one." The greenness of the background was apparently the cursor. It shifted two squares to the right and two down, calling attention to a face with long wavy black hair, strong features and too much eye makeup. A few more clicks and the onscreen figure of Roxanne suddenly had this new head.

"Match the nail color to the lipstick, Sir," suggested Minion.

"Oh, right." Click, and the nails on the image turned from the tasteful pink Roxanne wore for the cameras to a bright, showy red. "Now we add one of those generic female voices we got from the radio, save, upload and _voilà_!" He twisted the watch again and transformed before her eyes into the woman he'd just constructed on screen. He spoke in the new feminine voice as he turned around. "I'm all ready to - what's so funny?"

Roxanne was laughing so hard, she couldn't answer for a moment. Finally she got enough breath to say "It's so not you!" before surrendering to hilarity again.

"Oh? You think I'm not enough of an actor to pull it off?" He stood with his head so far up and his chest so far out that his disguise's breasts were practically thrusting themselves at her. "I am a master of disguise, Roxanne." Then he looked up and said "Mirror," in a tone of command.

A brainbot descended and hovered just above the keyboard. The screen behind it lit up with the image from its lens: the disguised Megamind, herself and Minion. Megamind turned and stepped over to it so that the disguise face took up most of the screen. He began to look at himself from various angles, exactly like a woman checking her reflection to see if her hair or makeup needs repair. He looked at Roxanne over his shoulder with a little flirtatious smile and batted his eyelashes.

"Not bad," she said. "Your eyes are still the same green, though."

"Yes, it disguises Minion's eyes perfectly, but for some reason we haven't yet figured out, it always leaves mine unchanged." He turned. "Minion, what about your disguise?"

"I think I should be your mom. That's who would come with a woman to help her pick out a wedding dress, right, Ms. Ritchi?"

"Right, or her sister, or her best friend," said Roxanne.

"I'm gonna go with her mom. I can take the same disguise and just age it and change the clothes and hair. And then we won't have to remember our character names. We can just call each other Mom and Honey." The fish stepped up to the main keyboard.

"Now, Roxanne," Megamind began in the feminine voice.

She interrupted him. "The accent! You sound like a woman doing a Megamind imitation."

Megamind looked shocked for a moment, then composed himself. When he spoke again, it was in the local accent, more or less like hers. "Let's try this again. Roxanne, where would you go for a wedding dress?"

"Macy's. They've got a big selection. Actually, we can go on their website and pick one out." He led her to a second keyboard.

They spent a pleasant fifteen minutes considering the selections, finding that their tastes diverged a bit. ("Look, Roxanne! That one has chrome studs on the shoulders!" "That's beadwork. Kinda klutzy beadwork, too." "It can be studs by the time Minion gets done with it. Or even spikes!" "Hey, what's the point of being in disguise if you're just going to buy something that reminds everybody of you? Let's look at this one with the sweetheart neckline.") Having made a first, second and third choice and phoned the store to make sure it had all three in her size, she clicked over to the shoe page and made sure he knew what kind of shoes to get.

"Now, what about rings?" she asked.

"If we were having a long engagement, I would make them. As it is, I suggest that we get a pair of plain gold bands, which we can rework later. What about the bou-kway?"

She smiled and decided that she'd imposed her will long enough. "Use your own judgment."

She had them drop her off at her apartment so she could get dressed for work. She also packed an overnight bag in which she included her birth certificate and a necklace that had been her grandmother's. On her way to the station, she slipped into Macy's herself and bought one item: blue panties with a little pink bow on the front. At work, she stealthily made a hole in her pantyhose ten minutes before air time, giving her an excuse to borrow the pair that her colleague, Peggy, kept in her desk. Fully accoutered, she rolled into the Lair at the end of her workday. She could smell another venison meal on the stove, a stew this time. Her stomach growled a little, but then she was distracted by the sight of her blue fiancé dashing up to her.

"There you are. Come-" He took her hand and started to pull her away, but she released the suitcase, flung her other arm around his neck and pulled him in for a kiss. He calmed and relaxed over the course of the kiss until, by the time it ended, he wasn't in any rush at all. "Mmm. You temptress. You've totally derailed my train of thought."

"Good." Another kiss was about to ensue when Minion appeared.

"Hey, boss, what's taki- Oh. Sorry." The fish looked at the floor, embarrassed, but he didn't leave.

"And now it's back on track again, I'm afraid. Roxanne, the store closes in fourteen minutes. We need you to look at everything and try it on, in case we need to exchange something." As he spoke, Minion picked up her suitcase and led the way to a little curtained-off area surrounded by a sewing machine, a long mirror, and other tailoring gear. She noticed that the curtain was not permanently hung. It was just being held up by brainbots. The fish opened the curtain, set her suitcase inside and held it for her, smiling. The gown was already inside on a dress form.

One thing about a modern wedding dress: the bride doesn't need any help getting in and out of it. Both the dress and the shoes fit perfectly. In only a couple of minutes, she stepped out, fully dressed, and turned to the mirror. At that moment, when she saw herself dressed to be married, the full emotional implications of what she was doing hit her.

"You look ravishing," Megamind said, but then he saw her face fall. "What's wrong? It's the dress, isn't it? Take it off right now and I can take -"

"It's not the dress," she said. "Or the shoes, or any of it. I just, well, I'm just feeling, I don't know, something..." She waved her hands vaguely, searching for the right word.

"Jitters?" suggested Minion.

"Well, kind of. Maybe. Not exactly. Give me a minute." She turned away from the mirror, taking a deep breath. "When my dad died, my parents were in divorce proceedings. It was really ugly and painful. I was twelve, and I decided that I was never going to risk going through a divorce because I was never going to get married. When I got older, I modified that. I decided I'd only get married if there was a solid, practical reason for it. I was actually more comfortable with the idea of a marriage of convenience than with a marriage for love. When you said you would take me along, the practical reasons were the first that occurred to me. I wanted to make our relationship more formal and solid in the hope that it would encourage your people to accept me." She smiled cynically for a moment. "I also wanted to put a big Private Property sign on you, to discourage all those blue women. And I actually was thinking that, since the decision to go with you was going to be the biggest change in my life and getting married was a strategy for making that go well, the marriage itself wasn't any big deal. Then I saw myself just now in the dress and it was like I was seeing my mom's wedding photo - we look a lot alike - and I saw myself as doing just what she did: eloping with a guy I hardly know just because he's cool. Do you understand?"

"Not entirely, but I'm very flattered and, well, happy at the idea of being your private property. It makes me feel like a stray dog that finally found a human to take him in." One blue hand took hers. "And since you're afraid that you don't know me well enough, I can at least make you this promise: you can ask me any questions about myself, any at all, and I will answer truthfully and completely. Will that help to ease your mind?"

"That's... it's good. I think it'll help, but I'm not sure. I told my great-aunt about all this and she told me to make you teach me how to drive the starship, so if things go wrong I can just come back. I don't want that to happen. I want to stay in love with you, but I'm afraid. I'm afraid that my intentions, and yours, really don't count for that much, like something bigger is at work here and neither of us can do anything about it. Like as soon as I put on that ring for real, the universe is going to declare open season on my happiness and I'm going to end up just as miserable as my mom."

"Oh, now I see. You're talking about destiny. On Earth, I was clearly destined to be a supervillain, but on Harolup I won't be because there's no superhero for me to fight. When we leave Earth, our earthly destiny gets left behind. We may have a new destiny on our new planet, but our previous destiny doesn't follow us. It's a clean plate!"

"I think you mean 'slate', sir."

"Oh, whatever, Minion. It's all metaphors, anyway. What I'm saying is -" He was interrupted by a loud rumble from his stomach.

"I think that slip might have been your subconscious telling you that plates are what we need to sit down in front of," Roxanne chimed in.

"Fifteen minutes while I put the biscuits in," said Minion, heading for the kitchen.

Over dinner, the three told each other their life stories. Roxanne had her notions of prison life radically revised. The two aliens were fascinated by the look into middle-class life that she unfolded, and Megamind even learned a few things about Minion's life alone during his incarcerations. After dinner, they left the brainbots to clean up. Roxanne, who had changed into a tee shirt and jeans before dinner, tucked the dress, pantyhose and white shoes back into the Macy's bag and put on her windbreaker. There was an underground tunnel leading from the lair's basement to a hidden boathouse, closed off from the outdoors and lit only by artificial lights. Part of the lake seemed to be enclosed with it; the boathouse roof covered a short dock with the jetboat tied up on one side and what appeared to be a small submarine on the other. The Evil Jetboat was a go-fast, the modern smuggler's favorite, black and tricked out with Megamind's usual array of spikes. Shark fangs were painted on the front. Roxanne was surprised to see the brainbots loading, in addition to her luggage, an electric guitar and a small amp. She asked about it.

"I thought we'd go to a place called Bessie's Blues Joint to celebrate," Megamind explained. "It's got good reviews as a dance club, with a live band every night, and Minion is hoping to sit in. I hope that meets with your approval."

"Sounds great."

They climbed aboard and the fish cast off. As Roxanne and Megamind settled down in the passenger seats, Minion in the driver's seat, a brainbot grasped the spike that protruded, bowsprit-like, from the prow. Two other brainbots took hold of the spikes that stood up on either side of the windshield and the three towed it away from the dock, into a little enclosed space at the far side of the boathouse. Once the boat was in place, they floated back to the dock and a wall rose from the water, sealing them off from everything else. For a moment, the only lights were those of the boat's dashboard. Then the roof slid back, revealing the underside of a larger dock, lit by reflected light from street lamps and the stars. Minion pushed a button and a folded roof, like a convertible roof, rose from the stern and settled in over their heads. Windows rose from the sides of the cabin to meet it so that they were completely sealed in. At the same time, the boat itself rose. The little compartment was a lock and it was filling. Minion flipped a switch labeled "Stealth Mode".

"Are we invisible?" Roxanne asked.

"Mmm-hmm," responded Megamind. "Make sure you're settled into a comfortable position. As soon as we're in open water, there is going to be some serious acceleration." The rising water brought them up to the surface of the lake under one of the big marina docks. The engines rumbled to life and the boat moved gently forward, out from under the dock, where it had barely fit. When they had plenty of space on all sides, it began to pick up speed, headed for the horizon, while the fish switched on the stereo, filling the little cabin with the sounds of Ozzy Ozbourne. Suddenly, Minion opened the throttle all the way up and turned the wheel to take them south.

  
  



	5. Chapter 5

Roxanne had been afraid that getting out of the Evil Jetboat and onto dry land without blowing their cover would be a non-trivial task, possibly involving clambering out from under a dock, but it turned out to be easy. Just north of the wedding district were several unused piers that had once served as loading points for now-empty warehouses. They simply tied up at one and unloaded. Then Minion pulled a remote from somewhere in his mechanism and engaged the stealth mode. Working street lamps were in short supply, so Minion, after he tucked away the remote, produced a flashlight that shone red. A red flashlight beam is less noticeable, Megamind explained. Humans tend to assume it's the taillight of a distant vehicle, so they don't pay much attention to it. The blue alien was in his tuxedoed disguise, but demonstrated that he could selectively shut down part of it to get at his ray gun. He walked ahead, carrying the guitar in its case and with the gun at the ready, while Minion, also in disguise, brought up the rear, carrying the amp and lighting their way. She strolled between the two of them, towing her little suitcase on its wheels, with the wedding outfit in the Macy's bag in her other hand.

As soon as they came to the better-lit part of town, the flashlight and the gun were tucked away and they joined the Saturday night crowd, which included several couples already in traditional wedding garb. Roxanne was wondering how her alien groom was going to manage the blood test (she was sure he'd manage it somehow) but it turned out that, in Indiana, only the bride's blood is deemed to be in need of testing.

There was a long line at the county clerk's office. Saturday night seemed to be a popular time for elopements. While they waited, they studied the brochures of chapels from the rack in the lobby. In addition to the typical white-with-roses Chapel of Love (three Justices of the Peace, no waiting) there was a Traditional Christian Chapel with a stained glass window, a Nature Chapel in a rooftop garden which could become a Jewish chapel on request, and even a Leather Chapel attached to a local BDSM dungeon. Megamind was so fascinated with that last option that Roxanne agreed, just out of curiosity, to go and have a look at it, even though a brochure titled "Your Simple Wedding" was at the top of her stack. During this discussion, Minion excused himself and waited with the luggage next to a bench. He got out the guitar, attached headphones and quietly practiced until they finished at the clerk's window.

The Bound In Darkness Dungeon and The Leather Chapel were in one of the older industrial buildings, with bare brick, wooden beams and black iron fittings providing atmosphere the moment they stepped inside. A cheerful middle-aged doorman of uncertain race, wearing black leather trousers and shirt, stood by the elevator. He explained that the chapel was upstairs, that (like the dungeon) there was a no-alcohol policy and that, if they wanted to check out the dungeon, voyeurism was allowed and accepted, but they would be charged the regular entrance fee (about double the price of a first-run movie ticket) even if all they did was look. He added that the crowd was generally friendly and accepting and there were people who would be happy to answer any questions they had. "Simple curiosity is tolerated and indulged," was how he put it. Roxanne and Megamind were both curious, but Minion was uncomfortable and urged them upstairs to the chapel.

When the elevator doors opened on the second floor, they were met by an older woman with long, flowing, obviously dyed red hair in a long, flowing, obviously genuine glove leather gown. Behind her were curtains, also of black leather, hiding the rest of the room. Light came from wall sconces on either side of the elevator door, with straight, pale necks made in imitation of candles, topped by flame-shaped light bulbs that flickered a little for a closer resemblance to actual flames. "Hi," she said. "My name is Patricia Grogan. I'm an ordained minister with the Church of All Worlds. What can I do for you this evening?"

All three visitors stood stock still for a moment with the same question in their minds: _Did she say Church of All Worlds?!_

Minion was the first to recover."I thought the Church of All Worlds was fictional."

The Reverend Grogan didn't seem surprised at the question. "The founders of my church were inspired by the fictional church. I have brochures that will tell you the whole story if you're interested."

That brought the other two back to reality. "We'd like to find out more," Roxanne said, "but that's not why we're here." She glanced at her disguised fiancé.

"Yes." Megamind picked up the thread. "We intend to get married tonight and we thought this chapel might be an interesting place to do it. Can we have a look?"

"Certainly. Right this way." The Reverend Grogan held the curtain open and they stepped inside. The chapel was cavernous, with a ceiling three stories high. They could hardly see it because the only lighting came from more of the imitation candle sconces. The walls were either granite blocks or some sort of fake stone. There were more black leather curtains at intervals along the walls. The floor also looked like stone but it felt, walking on it, like regular vinyl flooring. To their right, wooden folding chairs with black leather seats were stacked. Roxanne guessed that the place could hold fifty people. To their left was a raised dais with a podium, an altar with a black cloth, a small stereo and a tall cabinet. Directly opposite them, a carpet was rolled up.

"The size of the space is flexible," said their guide as they stepped out into the room, gazing around. "We can curtain off one section to create a more intimate space, or you can use it all, for the same price. We also have some costume items available for rent, and a small library of alternative wedding plan books you can consult." Her voice echoed a little.

"I like it," Megamind stage-whispered. Then in a more normal voice, he added, "It's not literally cold and damp, but it's got that quality to it. What do you think, Roxanne?"

"Not as bad as I thought," she replied. "I was afraid there were going to be, I don't know, torture racks or something."

"No, those are all downstairs," responded the Reverend Grogan. "It is possible to rent one and have it hauled up here, but that has to be arranged in advance."

"Can the altar cloth be another color?" the bride asked.

"We have several selections right back here," the clergywoman replied, and led the way to their left and through another door on the same wall as the elevator. It led to a smaller room with a rack of clothes on hangers, more cabinets and a desk that held several books and a computer with a large screen, with three chairs around it. The ersatz redhead led the way to the desk, where she sat down, woke up the screen and clicked through a few layers until a grid of photos came up, all of the same altar from the same angle but with different colored cloths. "What would you like to see?"

Roxanne settled into a chair and pointed to a robin's egg blue one. It enlarged to fill the screen. The lighter coloring around the edges turned out to be printed clouds. She turned to the other chair, but Megamind wasn't in it. He had only gotten as far as the clothes rack and was now wearing a hip-length black leather cloak with an irregular hem and a fur collar, preening in front of a mirror, while Minion looked on and encouraged him.

"John," she said, finding that she didn't like using his human name but not knowing what else to call him in this situation. He turned suddenly with a manic grin on his shapeshifted face.

"Oh! Roxanne! What do you think?" He spread his arms a little to make the cloak stand out. The fur collar framed the jewel in his shirt collar perfectly, and its irregular edges, clearly the untrimmed original hide edges, made him look like some barbarian prince.

"It looks good," she said. "I'm in favor of renting it. Now come and look at altar cloths." There were several with what the Reverend Grogan called sky themes. The groom liked the one printed with photos of storm clouds, mostly in shades of gray with plentiful lightning bolts, while the bride preferred a dark blue one with stars, suns and crescent moons with faces, drawn in the style of a 19th-century Mother Goose book. They both changed their minds when they saw the last one, black with a starfield printed on it, with the Milky Way Galaxy, as seen from Earth, around the edge, with the constellations outlined in blue.

Then Megamind pulled Roxanne back to the clothes rack to try on a white leather shawl, artfully cut and shaped, creating a quality of timeless beauty. She almost felt it would make her modern wedding dress look ridiculous. But he cajoled her into trying everything on, and when she saw herself in the mirror, she realized that it looked too good to not wear.

Then Minion weighed in with an opinion. "Sir, the cloak is very cool, but it makes your head look too small. Here." He held out a broad-brimmed black hat, like a riverboat gambler would wear in a Western, but of leather. Megamind looked at it as if he'd never imagined wearing such a thing (which he probably hadn't).

"Are you sure, M- Ronnie?"

"Just try it, sir." Megamind made no move to take the hat.

"Why that one?" Roxanne asked.

"It's sophisticated," said the blond figure with Minion's voice coming out. "But it's also kind of... frontier-y."

"Oh, I see where you're going with this." Now the disguised Megamind took the hat. He turned it in his hands, studying it, not sure how to put it on.

Roxanne stepped up. "Let me," she said, taking it from him, and put it on his head. He turned to the mirror.

"Hm. It does... kind of... work. And now I have this strange desire for a hand-rolled cigarette."

"You don't smoke, sir."

"Not to smoke, just to hold. And a little black pencil mustache." He mimed holding a cigarette with one hand, stroking his upper lip with the other. "And gloves. Ronnie, why didn't I bring gloves?"

"If you wear gloves, the ring won't fit."

"Oh. Right."

"So what do you say, hon?" Roxanne asked. "Do we get married here or do we go on to one of the other chapels?"

"Oh, I don't see how we can find a chapel with a higher coolness factor than this one."

"Let me bring up our standard contract," said the Reverend Grogan. "And then we'll outline a ceremony."

While she clicked through menus, Megamind pulled out one of the books on the desk and began studying it. In a moment, he looked up. "It says here that there are ceremonies for more than two people. Can you do that?"

"The only legal wedding I can perform is between two people of opposite sexes, but I can also perform non-binding ceremonies for three or more. Why?" Megamind, still wearing his first hat ever, was looking at Minion.

"Don't even think about it, sir. Normally, I go along with whatever you want, but not this." Megamind responded with an indignant frown. It would have looked thunderous on his real face, but on the disguise its power was muted. There was a moment of stand-off.

Then the smaller alien spoke. "Reverend Grogan, might the three of us speak privately for a few moments?"

"Sure. If you can leave the rental things on the rack, there's a small private room right through here."

Once they were rid of the extra leather, the clergywoman led them back out into the chapel, through a door behind a curtain behind the podium and into a very small room with too much furniture in it. The three of them filled it up. "I'll be on the computer when you're ready." She closed the door and was gone.

The two aliens immediately began to scrutinize the walls, ceiling and furniture.

"What are you looking for?" asked Roxanne.

"Cameras," they replied, almost in unison. After another minute, they pronounced the place clean, touched their wrists and resumed their normal appearances.

Megamind was the first to speak. "All right, Minion. Just what is the difficulty here?"

"It's Ms. Ritchi, sir. No offense," he glanced over at her, "but I think she's gonna bail. I think she'll end up getting cold feet and we'll lift off without her."

"And therefore you don't want to engage in any sort of binding ritual, but you'd let me go through with it."

"It would make you happy for a little while, sir, and then when she bailed, you'd be disgusted with her whole species. It would make it easier to leave Earth behind."

"Minion?" Roxanne asked. "What would it take for you to believe that I mean it about coming with you?"

"Since her willingness to marry me doesn't seem to be enough for you," added Megamind.

"I don't know," the fish began. "I think... doing the hard parts. Mainly, learning the language. It's really different from English, a lot more than an Earth language."

Roxanne, besides having sharp observation skills, also had a very good memory, and she had been training both from the time she knew she wanted to be a reporter, in fifth grade. Reporting on international politics, she had developed a technique for dealing with the problem of foreigners talking with each other in their own language when they didn't want the Americans around them to understand: she was able to memorize the sounds of what they said, repeat it into a transcriber, then feed the text from the transcriber into a translator. It wasn't perfect, but it would give her the gist of what had been said. She had gotten more than one scoop that way. Now she used the same technique. She called to mind the fish narrator of the interstellar message, remembering the sounds it made as it spoke, and began to repeat them. The language had a click sound in it, and a gulp, and a sort of squishing sound, and the vowels slid all over the place, but she managed it as far as the first pause in the speech. Her two listeners looked amazed.

"That was... pretty close," Minion admitted.

"Now say 'Vit o[squish] Amnang öu,'" Megamind requested eagarly.

"What does it mean?" she asked.

"It means 'I love you, Megamind.'"

"So your name is in it?"

"Yes."

"So do you mind telling me which part it is, or were you expecting me to marry you without knowing your real name?"

Minion snickered.

"Come to think of it, why don't you both tell me what your names are in your own language, since where we're going, that's what everyone will be using?"

"Okay," said the fish. "I'm Ilu Menang."

"And I," said Megamind with a little flourishing hand gesture, "am Ilu Amnang."

"And vit o[squish] Amnang öu,'" she said. The blue alien beamed all over his face, stepped closer and put an arm around her waist. "And is it the same word whether it's romantic love or family love?"

"Vit o[squish] Roxanne öu," Megamind replied with his face next to her ear. "And for family love, you'd replace 'vit' with '[click]at'."

"So [Click]at o[squish] Menang öu." She looked at Minion as she said it, holding out her hand.

The fish smiled hesitantly. "[Click]at o[squish] Roxanne öu," he finally replied, taking her small human hand in his large steel one. "You know, I think this might work out after all."

###

Roxanne stood outside the leather curtain in her bridal costume, rented white leather shawl included, holding the bouquet, which Megamind had carried in dehydrated form. It was composed entirely of bird of paradise flowers. She didn't ask why he had chosen that particular flower; it had to be because of the spiky look of the petals. She heard her cue, "Here Comes the Bride" on solo electric guitar, and slipped in. Because it was only the three of them plus the clergywoman, they had opted to curtain off the dais and hold the wedding in the smaller room thus created. Inside it, the two disguised aliens waited, Megamind in what she couldn't help thinking of as his Zorro costume in front of the alter, Minion off to one side, playing the guitar. She walked with a slow, natural dignity, but she was still standing beside her fiancé well before the short tune was over. Minion stepped up just behind them, his guitar still slung, the cord trailing back to the amp.

"Roxanne, Amnang and Menang;" began the Reverend Grogan. "The future is coming. It's mostly unknown, especially the far future, the decades to come. That's what makes it an adventure. It will almost certainly include joy and wonder, disappointment and sorrow, satisfaction and frustration, boredom and total surprise. There's a lot you can't control. In the long run, you don't know where you're going to end up living, who your neighbors will be, what work you will do, how long you'll remain able-bodied and in good health, or how long you will live. But now, at this moment, you are here to make a choice about one aspect of your future: to choose to be together, to treat each other lovingly, to trust and be trustworthy, to stand by each other and look first to your well-being as a family, before your interests as individuals. This is what makes a partnership into something more than an emotional bonding: that it can call forth qualities of considerateness, generosity and even sacrifice when the situation calls for it. Partnership provides the partners with a point of stability in the chaos of life. Your partners can catch you when you fall, support you when you face difficulties, celebrate your successes, commiserate in your failures, and point out your follies, hopefully before you actually act on them. Shared joy is doubled, shared grief is halved, and those who stand together are always stronger than those who try to stand alone. Therefore, speak your vows, and claim the gift of partnership."

Roxanne spoke first. "Amnang," she said, looking at her beloved. "You're not the kind of man my mother wanted for a son-in-law. Boy, are you not. But you're the kind I want for a husband: bold, creative, brilliant, secretly a softie, and almost as handsome as you think you are. Being with you is going to be the most amazing adventure anybody could ever have, and I'm grateful to be on it. Therefore I choose you, now and for life."

"Roxanne," the groom replied. "Being adopted in America has given me many things, good and bad. In many ways, it's been a difficult path, but all the unpleasantness is canceled out by its most wondrous gift: having you in my life. From the moment I first saw you, I have secretly longed for you, hardly daring to hope that you would return my feelings. Your presence here, today, beside me, is the sweetest and most miraculous event of my time on Earth, and wherever I go, your love will remain the lodestone to which I will always be drawn. Therefore I choose you, for life. Er, and now." He gritted his teeth at his flub, but like any experienced showman, he knew that when a flub has happened and there's no calling it back, the only thing to do is move on. Along with Roxanne, he turned to Minion.

"Amnang and Roxanne," the fish began. "I gotta be honest. I didn't think this would ever happen. I still think it's gonna take an awful lot of work. But I also think it'll be worth it, and I want you to know that I'm behind you all the way. So, to show you I mean it..." he paused to reach into a pocket in the disguise that was an access point into one of the compartments in his gorilla suit. Pulling out a jeweler's box, he opened it and held it between them, saying, "I give you these to give to each other." They each pulled a ring out of the box, held it in their right hands and held out their left hands with the fingers spread. "With this ring, I thee wed," they said simultaneously, sliding the rings onto the appropriate fingers.

"Then by the authority vested in me by the Church of All Worlds and the State of Indiana, I now pronounce you husband and wife." Without further prompting, they kissed while Minion played the traditional closing tune. They kept kissing as long as the music lasted, and he decided to draw out the last few notes, with a little vibrato work. They finally broke off, thoroughly out of breath, during the concluding reverb.

  
  



	6. Chapter 6

It was late morning when Megamind woke up. There was a moment when he wondered why there was another person in bed with him. Then he remembered: the wedding, the walk to the blues joint, the champagne, the discovery on the dance floor that his style and Roxanne's worked so perfectly together that before long the other dancers cleared a circle to watch them while Minion traded licks with the lead guitarist. Then more champagne, more dancing and her introducing him to the slow "belt buckle polisher" style. Closing time, breakfast in an all-night diner, returning to the jetboat. They were far enough out on the water that the lights of Wolf Lake were no brighter than the stars, when she asked "Did you ever ride all the way up front?"

  
"What do you mean?" he'd asked.

"Show you. Menang, could you turn off the stealth mode and put the top down?"

"I'm kind of scared of where you're going with this," the fish had said, but he'd nevertheless done as she asked, slowing the boat at the same time, while behind him she shed her shoes and, reaching under her skirt in a maneuver so quick and modest that he didn't realize what she was doing until she did it, peeled off her pantyhose. Then she had stepped past Minion, climbed up on the boat's long deck cover and walked barefoot up its length to the point where it became narrow enough to straddle with her legs dangling on either side, like riding a horse. And that is what she had done, settling her white dress under her and looking back flirtatiously over her shoulder in the moonlight.

"Well?" she had asked. "Gonna join me?"

"Sir, I don't think this is a good idea," Minion had objected, but Megamind was already unbuckling his boots.

"Nonsense," he'd said. "You're skillful enough driving this thing to avoid dumping us in the lake, and if we do hit a freighter's wake wrong or something, you'll just pick us up, right?"

Minion had slowed the boat until it was barely moving while Megamind got his boots and socks off. Then the blue alien had climbed over the robotic suit and executed a leap that looked wild but was, in fact, carefully calculated. He landed on his bottom, legs open, and slid to a stop spooned behind Roxanne. He put his hands around her waist and nuzzled her neck. At that point, the fish had startled them both by engaging the stealth mode again, so that they seemed to be sitting on nothing a few feet above the dark water, and gently opening the throttle. They'd ridden all the way home like that, with the wind in her hair and the spray flying on either side. They did hit the wakes of big ships a couple of times, but Minion had steered straight across them, Roxanne had held onto the forward spike, Megamind had held onto her and, although the ride got pretty rough, they'd managed to stay aboard, both of them whooping with delight. They'd rolled right into the hidden boathouse sitting out there, counting on the lateness of the hour to make complete invisibility unnecessary. Dear God, what a woman. She hadn't minded being chilly and wet, or getting a hole in the back of her white dress. "It served its purpose," she'd said with a shrug and a smile when Minion pointed it out as they were disembarking. They'd left the dress, along with the rest of their sodden clothes, in the hamper in the master bathroom.

She had temporarily lost her smile then, and her eyes had widened. While he had told her that his endowment did grow, he hadn't said how much. "I don't think it's going to fit," was what she'd said. At that point, he'd led her into the bedroom and opened a nightstand drawer to reveal his technological solution: a series of dildos in a range of sizes from barely larger than a tampon to almost as big as he was. He'd demonstrated that all of them heated up and and were capable of more intense vibration than was usually available in battery-powered toys, and there were also clit massagers and butt plugs and several kinds of lube. It had been a very experimental, exploratory wedding night, and the plan he'd figured out had, for once, worked. Every time she'd had an orgasm, he'd switched to the next larger size of dildo, gradually opening her up until, in the end, he did fit. By that time, he'd been so aroused that he hadn't lasted long, but after seven orgasms, she'd had no complaints.

Without otherwise moving, he did a fist pump in the air above the bed. Then he lay still, waiting with unaccustomed patience and a smile of contentment until Roxanne moved a little and made a little "Mmm" noise, indicating that she was close to waking up. Then he rolled over next to her, embraced her and nuzzled her. She returned his attentions with interest. She started asking him for the words in Tseri[gulp]uu (the alien language) for various body parts. So they had a kind of erotic language lesson.

It was mid-afternoon when they finally got out of bed. While they were showering, a brainbot notified Minion. By the time they wandered into the kitchen area, he was heating up the leftover stew and setting out bread and butter.

"How are things going, Minion?" Megamind asked.

"Tsreya[click]or [squish]aili Tseri[gulp]uu kvi?" asked Roxanne. She had decided that, whenever she heard them speaking English, she would ask how to say it in Tseri[gulp]uu. Her husband obliged, and the rest of the conversation proceeded sort of at half speed because everything was repeated in both languages.

"I've finished writing the modifications to the orbital construction software, Sir, but I want you to take a look at it before we implement. Same with this list I made of all the construction materials we'll have to get."

"Good. I'll get started on the list first. Have you given any further thought to cyborg shipment?"

"Not really, Sir. You're better at that stuff than I am."

"Cyborg?" asked Roxanne. "What cyborgs are you bringing?" She was thinking of the humanoid cyborgs depicted in movies.

"The brainbots are cyborgs," Megamind explained. "They'll be extremely useful at our destination, but the ship only has so much capacity, so we'll be scrapping most of their bodies, bringing the brains and counting on being able to build them new bodies when we get there. The way things look now, we should be able to bring ten or twelve with bodies, plus the central controller. They'll be able to start reassembling the others as soon as they can get the materials."

"And don't forget Spider Bot," added Minion.

"Yes, yes. The eight-legged design will do wonderfully on the uneven surface of unexplored lands. I wouldn't be surprised if Spee-ider Bot ended up being cloned several times."

"Maybe you could send plans for the bodies in this message you're sending ahead of us," she suggested. "That way somebody might have some materials waiting for us."

"The message!" exclaimed the blue man. "That's what we need to work on next. Roxanne, can you write us a script?"

"First, I want to see the incoming message again, this time with you translating from the beginning, and pauses for explanations until I really understand what I'm hearing. That will give me the correct forms of address and things like that."

"We'll do that first thing after we eat."

###

For the second showing, Megamind had brainbots put the two kitchen chairs side by side, facing the hand print on the message drone. Once they were seated, he told her how to pause, reverse, fast reverse and fast forward the hologram projector by selected touches. Forward was the same as Start, which she had already figured out. She wrote it down in her little reporter's notebook, then touched Start. The first thing she noticed as the fish narrator appeared again, was how odd seemed that this fish wasn't in a suit or a tank or anything. It was as if the camera had been in the water with him.

Megamind began to speak as the fish did, while Roxanne took notes furiously. "Greetings to you, my fellow survivors of the destruction of the-" The blue man paused the projection. "-Alpha Upsilon Sagittarius group of stars, about sixteen hundred light years from us. In Tseri[gulp]uu it's just called Me Weä [Squish]iyey, the Home Star Group." He started it again. "My name is Sa[squish]ikwuë Nawa. In Me Weä [Squish]iyey, I piloted a commercial space liner traveling between Lup and [Click]ëalup. As the liner was boarding in Lup High Orbit, I along with the pilots of all the other interstellar vessels in Lup space at that time, received an overriding order from our military high command, informing us that a previously unknown hostile civilization had targeted the suns of all the inhabited worlds of Me Weä [Squish]iyey with a weapon called the Star Eater." Roxanne gasped at the idea that her beloved's home world had been destroyed on purpose, but she didn't stop the message. "We were ordered to come to this planet, Harolup, which lies a long way outside Me Weä [Squish]iyey and therefore had a chance of escaping the destruction. Fourteen of us obeyed, assembling here in Harolup High Orbit. Our initial population, passengers and crew members, was one hundred and eighty-nine members of each of the Tseri[gulp]uu, plus forty-three Glau (that's Metro Mahn's species), seventeen Colna and three Ekwa. (Those are the two other intelligent species from Me Weä [Squish]iyey.) The non-Tseri[gulp]uu, all except for one Colna, immediately took two of the vessels and departed for planets claimed by their civilizations, where their species might be numerous enough for an adequate gene pool. That one, Ileala-Atii, is in an interspecies marriage with a woman of my species and chose to stay with her wife." Megamind paused it again. "They actually have a word for interspecies marriage. It's emkla, literally cross-bond."

"Not only that, they're accepting enough of it so this Ileala-Atii person felt okay about staying with them. Good news for us. But wait a minute. When you said, your species, you meant separately from Minion's species, right?"

He nodded.

"So are there separate words for the separate species, different from Tseri[gulp]uu?"

"Tseri[gulp]uu means the Paired Peoples. My people are the Yi[gulp]velit; Yi[gulp]vi is the singular. Minion's are the Opuulu, singular and plural."

"Got it. Okay." She wrote as she spoke.

He started the projection again. It almost immediately switched to the image of the Milky Way. "This was Me Weä [Squish]iyey's location within the galaxy." The view zoomed in until it was centered on one group of stars. "The last of us to depart reported that, not only the stars hosting inhabited planets, but every star in the cluster was destroyed. There were known habitable planets around Me Weä [Squish]iyey in all directions. We who came to Harolup knew of Earth but were advised to avoid it because of the uncertainty of our welcome from the natives. Whoever made the decision to send you there was acting independently." As the speaker paused and the camera zoomed in on Harolup, Megamind commented "The way he says that word, 'independently', makes it clear that he does not approve." The fish's voice started up again and Megamind resumed translating. "We have joined the largest of our vessels into a high-orbital habitat. With it, we have been able to produce several food species and establish a colony on the surface. Thus we maintain the Tseri[gulp]uu way of life, the only place in the Galaxy that it survives, so far as we are aware. There's a regularly scheduled shuttle between the orbiter and the colony every six days, but additional trips are common. Functions are gradually being moved down onto the surface as the colony is developed. As this is being recorded, children are still born, reared and trained in orbit, going to the surface only when they are-." This was the scene of the naked people around the pool.

Roxanne paused it at an image of a Yi[gulp]vi woman breastfeeding a baby. "This is pretty smart advertising," she remarked.

"You mean, not just tempting me with naked women, but tempting me with the possibility of a family."

"Yeah. So we should talk about that. I've never wanted to be a mom, but I think I'd be okay with being, like, a non-custodial stepmom." She smiled. "Especially of a kid who looked like you."

He smiled back. "Well, given what they said about the barely viable gene pool, I think they'd take my contribution, and Minion's, under whatever circumstances we'd be willing to give them. And Minion passionately wants to be a parent. Look." He ran it backward to the shellfish-farming scene. Yi[gulp]velit (wearing transparent bubble helmets and nothing else) and Opuulu worked together, using little hoses attached to a large tank to squirt something into each mollusk. He paused it, then walked around to stand almost in the image and point out what was happening in the upper left corner: a large Opuulu with a hose attached to it by a sort of harness was speaking to both a smaller one and a blue girl who looked about seven or eight years old. "When he saw that, he literally sobbed with longing. And we are expected to reproduce in pairs. His child would need a child of mine to bond with."

"So it sounds like you'd reproduce out of duty but you wouldn't be looking forward to it."

Her blue husband took a breath. He looked at the image of the little blue girl as he spoke. "Parenthood requires certain qualities: patience, thoughtfulness, self-discipline; qualities I haven't got. Minion says I can't even take care of myself, and he may be right. I would dearly love to have a child in my life, but... I don't know whether I could be trusted with one." He looked so mournful that she rose, came around the projector and hugged him.

"If every parent had to have all the qualities children need in a parent, before they actually had any kids, the human race would have died out a long time ago," she reassured him. "But, for one thing, you don't need to stand alone as a parent, and for another, it's not uncommon for people who have kids to grow the qualities they need. Just because it looks impossible from here doesn't mean it is. And I bet Minion told you that when you were talking about being a parent here."

"Yes. It was right after I got the cloning technique for brainbot production worked out. I immediately started thinking about cloning ourselves. He was very discouraging."

"Well, it is pretty much unheard of for supervillains to have kids. And can you imagine a three-year-old running around this place?" She gestured to indicate the lair around them.

The blue man smiled. "Yes, cannibalizing my projects to build his own. I'd hardly be able to keep a piece of equipment intact."

She gave him a skeptical look.

"Oh, yes, I was inventing and building at that age, whenever the opportunity arose. The warden and the guards had their hands full to keep me occupied without doing damage. Well, much damage."

"Sounds like you should definitely wait to reproduce until you're among people who know what to do with little blue geniuses."

"And until we've lined up a potential mother who's willing to put up with a human stepmother as part of the package."

"Maybe they'll pair you up with that woman who's married to the, what did he call it? Colna?"

"Remember, by the time we arrive at Harolup, twenty years will have passed since they sent this message out. That woman will be middle-aged and will very likely have done her reproducing already. No, we'll just have to see who's available when we get there. Do you want to see the rest of this?"

"Yeah. I've almost got enough to do a simple linguistic analysis. Just let me go get more paper." Linguistics had been her minor in college and she was eager to see whether the first known extraterrestrial language fit into the theories developed on Earth.

"Linguistic analysis? Menang and I did a linguistic analysis of Tseri[gulp]uu years ago. Let me print it out for you. And there's more paper in the cabinet under the printer."

###

Roxanne spent the rest of the day scrutinizing the language. Every once in a while she would interrupt one of the aliens with a question about it. Fortunately, they were both doing very interruptible things: Megamind was testing the computer code that would tell the brainbots how to build the starship, while Minion was shopping for materials and components online and on the phone. Just before bedtime, she gathered up her nerve and called her mother. The conversation went more or less as badly as she expected and she was glad to have her new husband to turn to for comfort and distraction afterward.

The next day, she got the email from Professor Slausson. The professor was very enthusiastic. She attached a copy of the three pages of advice given by the department to all anthropology grad students departing for their first fieldwork assignments and included a list of suggested books on coping with culture shock and doing ethnographic research. Roxanne forwarded the document to Megamind and Minion and ordered three copies of the culture shock books, since in many ways the culture of Harolup would be new to them, too. Over the course of the next week, she and the professor arranged for the first of her videos from Harolup to be received by the professor's department in twenty years, even if the professor herself was no longer there. Roxanne also gave notice to her landlord and to her boss at KMCP, broke the news to her sister, and arranged for Goodwill to pick up her furniture. Finally, she finished the script for the message to Lup. She had a silly impulse to buy a safari suit and a pith helmet, but limited herself to a pair of good hiking boots. Meanwhile, stuff began to arrive at the lair: a gross of weather balloons, a quarter-kilo of some rare mineral, sheets of specially treated glass and spools of wire. On their one-week wedding anniversary, they filmed Roxanne's script, loaded it into the message drone, and watched the little spacecraft lift itself off the floor of the Lair and vanish through the hologram wall.


	7. Chapter 7

She told everyone at KMCP that she was going into anthropology, doing field work in a remote society that had very little contact with Western civilization. About ten days after she gave notice, her boss called her into his office and asked her if the rumor was true."Which rumor?" she asked.

"That Megamind is leaving Earth, going back to his own people, and you're going with him."

"Think about it, Frank. If Megamind is leaving and I want him to go, whether or not I want to go with him, the last thing I'm going to do is make it public."

"You think if the world know that he's going, that'll make him less likely to go?"

"Megamind has enemies. Some are scientists who want to study him or inventors who want to steal his ideas. Some are fellow criminals who have grudges against him. If they think they're about to lose their last chance to get what they want from him, they'll act right away. They might do things like target one or more of the prisoners who raised him, who are now old men, out of prison and living on the right side of the law. They might start searching for his hide-out, and if they got close, he'd have to restrict his movements to avoid discovery. At the very least, they'd delay him, and the longer he's delayed, the more likely he is to change his mind. And one of them might even succeed, just out of sheer random luck. So, officially, there's no story."

"But unofficially?" Frank had the same hunger for information, especially secrets, that Roxanne had. It's endemic in the news business.

"One of these days, a little while after my last day here, I'll send you a text with one word: Tonight. When you get it, have a camera out on one of the piers, with a nice wide view of the lake, between three a.m. and dawn."

"Thanks, Roxanne. And good luck with the, ah, anthropological research. Or would that be the word if they people you're studying aren't human?"

"Xenological. I'm going to be the first human field xenologist in history."

###

Metro Man was in the lair for about fifteen seconds. The brainbots did not sound the intruder alert because he was moving too fast to trigger a response.  
He'd found it by the simple expedient of watching Roxanne (from the top of a convenient building) as she left work. He'd seen her stroll through the hologram wall, kiss her erstwhile kidnapper with enthusiasm and speak with him and Minion in a language full of the kind of noises he'd expect in an old Spike Jones song. There had been no signs of missile construction, but the first time he'd seen a weather balloon launch (by a disguised Minion) from the Lair's roof with a payload of confusing machinery and electronics, he'd watched it rise all the way up into the stratosphere, where a larger-than-usual brainbot collected the payload and continued upward into orbit. One of the satellites up there, one he'd never particularly noticed before, turned out to be swarming with brainbots. There was something being built up there, all right, something that didn't seem to contain any explosives (although there was lots of empty space, so that could change) but did contain seats, one sized for Minion's gorilla suit, directly behind the glass and the instrument panels, and two human-sized behind it. In other words, exactly what he'd see if Megamind really were building a starship and planning to take Roxanne with him. Wayne had also tried to watch the work going on inside the Lair whenever he had a break in his hero work, but looking through the hologram wall for any length of time gave him a headache, so he finally decided to just go in at super speed and see what he could find out.

He ended up going in there almost daily over the course of the next three weeks. He saw Megamind working at his forge, Minion assembling tiny electronic components under a microscope and Roxanne writing a two-column page with English in one column and strange symbols in the other. One day he saw the jetboat stripped of its spikes and what he figured were components Megamind had invented, that gave it invisibility, disguise and/or whatever other supervillainous capabilities he had added to it. The hero came back the next day to find the boat gone and a suitcase of dysprosium standing on the dock in the hidden boathouse. He recognized it because he had dealt with dysprosium smuggling before. Since China had banned its export, the rare mineral had been impossible to get on the open market, but as long as there's demand, criminals will find a way to satisfy it, and for its various scientific and high-tech uses, there was no substitute for dysprosium. Next to be stripped was the car, its spikes and fins and unconventional components all ending up in the same heap with the ones from the boat, a heap that was accumulating more and more strange technology as the days went by.

He finally figured out that the key to everything was the odd arrangement of pieces of paper hung on strings from the ceiling behind a red curtain. It took him almost three seconds of real time, but he finally figured it out. The star ship's cargo was arranged to the inch. Almost half of it would be brainbot cores. There were designated spaces for everything from seeds and soil samples to working brainbots to Minion's spare suits to Roxanne's luggage. There were also plans for an invisible barge that would be loaded with all of Megamind's unknown technology that he wasn't taking with him, topped with five sealed containers of thermite with radio-controlled release valves. In the small hours of their departure date (which wasn't specified; he figured it would depend on the weather), the submarine, piloted by Minion, would tow the barge out onto the lake, anchoring it at a point away from the regular shipping lanes. Then he would take the sub down and settle into what the villains called a hidey-hole in the bottom of the lake. Then he would separate the component of the sub that he was in, called the Detachable Pressurized Guidance Module, and return while robotic components mounted on the sub deployed a camouflaging and metal-detector-thwarting cover. Minion would attach the DPGM to the bottom of the barge, leave it, swim back to the Lair and suit up.

Just before departure, a hologram projector located on the underside of the barge would project the illusion of a rocket launching from beneath the lake. The main purpose of this illusion was specified: Distract Metro Man. But there was another one. Under cover of the projected blast, the thermite would be released. It would burn down through the heap of inventions, reducing everything to slag, reaching the hologram projector and the DPGM well after the illusory rocket would have seemed to ascend out of sight. (The hero had to admit, it was one way of preventing the stuff from falling into the wrong hands.) During the pretend launch, Megamind, on the roof of the Lair, would dehydrate Roxanne and Minion, seal each of them into an airtight pressurized bubble tethered to a cluster of weather balloons, and release both clusters. (With the occupants dehydrated, the bubbles would sag, appearing nearly empty; few would suspect that each actually contained a person.) Then he'd step into the last bubble, seal himself in, press the remote to release the last cluster, and dehydrate himself. The three bubbles would be collected in the stratosphere by brainbots, towed to the starship, and fitted, one at a time, onto the airlock, which would suck the contents of each into the passenger compartment. The mechanism for rehydrating the three was not specified, but Wayne was sure it hadn't been forgotten.

Another section of the dangling file system seemed to be the "completed" section. In it, he found a list of accounts set up at financial institutions, not only in Metro City but in Switzerland, Singapore and the Cayman Islands, mainly for holding tax-free long-term government bonds of various sorts, although there were also safe deposit boxes containing cash, documents and valuables. The submarine had also been stuffed with cash in several local currencies, gold and silver bullion, documents for a half-dozen false identities, and all the materials and equipment needed for building two disguise generator watches and adding stealth mode to a vehicle, plus a few inappropriate things to add confusion, just in case any Earthlings did stumble across it and try to guess, from what they found, what could be built. Some of the dysprosium was in there. He considered taking the list, since it was essentially the ingredient list for two of the villain's most effective inventions, but as he thought about it, the hero realized that there wasn't a single human being he knew whom he would trust with this knowledge. Neither could he bring himself to abort the whole process by apprehending Megamind, now that he knew where the blue alien was, and hauling him back to prison. In addition to the personal matter of not wanting to deal with Roxanne's reaction, it seemed to him that this was what was best, not only for Megamind and Minion, but for Metro City and for the alien colony they were going to, where they could make a contribution as they never could here. The only thing that felt wrong about it was Roxanne going along, but she was a grown woman and he felt that he had to respect her decision, no matter how big a mistake he thought she was making. Glancing through the walls, he could see her asleep in Megamind's arms. It looked to him like the mistake had already been made.

Metro Man stayed in super speed just long enough to fly to a local diner. When he ordered a Dr. Pepper (not his favorite, but he tried to avoid throwing his known preference behind any one brand, knowing that the citizens' propensity to imitate him could drive a local bottler out of business) the waitress gasped and squealed and forgot everyone else's order in her rush to fill his. That was satisfying, as was her assurance that it was on the house, but then she asked for his autograph. When he signed her order pad, it started an avalanche. Everyone in the place, customers and staff and passers by who had seen him through the window, was coming up to him with paper and pens. It was an hour before he got out of there, and his drink was weak, the ice half melted. He took it up to the top of Metro Tower to finish it, sitting like a gargoyle on the edge of the circular roof. He wondered what it would be like to live in a society where he was just like everyone else, not because he lost his powers but because everyone had them. To live among his own kind. He held out his cup in the general direction of the Lair.

"Here's to you, little buddy," he said to the empty air. "Have a great trip and a great life."  
###

"Alligators. Five of them... No, I don't feed them citizens. They get internal organs of cattle, hogs and lambs from a local slaughterhouse... No, they are trained to put on a very menacing show, but if they were to actually get a citizen at their mercy, they would take it in turns to hold that person for their master. Minion has actually trained them with squeaky toys so that they can hold a human limb in their jaws without harm... Well, their taste in music is horrible... Disco... Oh, seriously, Vector. I'm offering you five living objects of terror... Aargh!" Megamind folded up the phone and handed it to Minion with an expression of frustration. "What is the problem with this new generation of villains that they can't be bothered with fearsome creatures that I'm offering them absolutely free?"

"Nfi[click]ngti sëÿzl kwawyi[squish] toh zhöüë?" Roxanne was trying to speak only in Tseri[gulp]uu in the Lair. What she said was 'May I make a suggestion?' transliterated word for word from English.

"Actually, the correct phrasing would be 'Nfi[click]ngti kwahöuneh toh [gulp]wriyi?'" Minion responded. "It transliterates to 'May I suggest something?'" Megamind merely looked at her with a silly smile. He adored hearing his new wife speaking his native language, no matter how badly. Roxanne repeated Minion's correction. The conversation continued in Tseri[gulp]uu, with some English nouns.

"[Please suggest it,]" the fish requested.

"[The] alligators [are not well-known anywhere except here in] Metro City. [Why don't you ask if the] zoo [will take them]?"

"[We don't say 'Why don't you',]" corrected Minion. "[Well, we do, but it's faintly insulting. It's only used when you think the other person is being stupid. Better to use 'You might'. Boss, what do you think of Roxanne's suggestion?]"

"Hmm? Oh. [I haven't met anyone at the] zoo." As in Spanish, the Tseri[gulp]uu said 'I have met this person' where an English speaker would say 'I know this person.'

"[I've met the boss of] public relations [at the] zoo," Roxanne answered. "[I could call her.]"

"[Yes, try that. And, Menang, what would be the nearest translation for] public relations?"

"[I don't know, sir. It wasn't something a little fish would be likely to hear.]" That was the unspoke limit to Roxanne's language lessons. Amnang had been an infant, Menang a small child, when they came to Earth. There was a lot about their own culture that they didn't know. That was also the reason that pretty much all positions of authority came out as the same word, the one Minion called Megamind when, in English, he would have called him "Boss" or "Sir".

Roxanne was finding even the child-level version of the language tiring. She was on the steep part of the learning curve and she was glad to switch into English for the phone call. Megamind had modified her phone so that it could interface with the Lair's system to allow her to make calls without revealing her location. She pulled it out and dialed.

"Hi, Moira? Roxanne Ritchi... Just great. How about you?... Megamind is getting rid of his alligators. You want 'em?...Well, I got kidnapped, and I overheard him on the phone to some other villain, trying to give his alligators away, and getting turned down, so I offered... That would be great. No, he should call me. Thanks, Moira." She put the phone away.

"[The boss of the] reptile [house is going to call me.]"

"[That is excellent.]" said her blue husband. "[If you can take on that task, I can remove it from the plan.]" He went behind the red curtain, which was there to protect his "hanging garden," as he called the arrangement of papers on strings hung from the ceiling that he used to keep track of his ideas, from being battered by the breeze of fast-moving evil vehicles. "[Menang, did you alter the arrangement in here?]"

"[No, sir. The brainbots found several pages on the floor this morning. Maybe they didn't put them all back in the right places.]"

"[I don't like this. The pages aren't torn, and those clips don't release all by themselves. I'm going to take an hour off from preparations and set up a process to turn out a hundred or so of those little sensors. By dinner time, I want one attached to every page. The next time something like this happens, I want to know about it right right away.]"


	8. Chapter 8

Roxanne didn't like being dehydrated. In fact, as her bubble approached the little starship, she made a mental note to avoid dehydration in the future unless it was absolutely necessary. It didn't help that she was just a bit nauseated, although she'd made sure to have an empty stomach for the departure, so the airsickness bag in her pocket wasn't needed. Her hair was in constant motion, responding to every movement in the air around it, as it would if she were under water, but faster. 

The ship wasn't much like the starships in movies. It was a geodesic globe composed of five-sided flat panels because that was the shape that would enclose the most area with the least mass, and the less mass they used for the ship itself, the more cargo they could carry. The only way to tell which direction was the front was by the fact that there were three panels in a row there that were glass. Through the middle one, she could see Minion already in the pilot's seat, which was the driver's seat from the Invisible Car. He waved as the brainbot towed her past the windows, "up" to the airlock. The Earth was behind her; only a crescent of it was in daylight, but that was enough that she cast a faint shadow against the hull. As she approached, a group of three panels flipped open like a flower blooming. The brainbot pushed her bubble through the opening into the airlock itself. The panels flipped shut, sealing her in, and she heard the hiss of air filling the little compartment. When the screen on the far wall showed the words Full Pressure, she unsealed her bubble, pushed herself out of it, then stowed it in one of the compartments on the wall, as she'd been told. It was a clumsier process than she expected because of the lack of gravity; she had to hold onto a handhold with one hand while stuffing with the other or her shove would propel her away from the wall. Then she touched the button that opened the round interior hatch and pulled herself through. It shut automatically after her.

There was only a narrow passageway between the skin of the ship and the crowd of cargo containers. It offered plenty of handholds on both sides, so she pulled herself along easily until she came to the passenger compartment. She grinned at Minion, who looked straight "up" through the lid of his dome to grin back at her. Then she kicked off gently from the edge of the window and tried to kip around in the air so as to reverse her position and land in her seat (actually an acceleration couch) on her back. It didn't work; she struck the seat with her right shoulder and bounced off.

"Here you go, Roxanne." Minion had been calling her by her first name ever since the wedding, although he still called Megamind Sir. He caught her other shoulder with one mechanical hand and the wrist extended until he was able to gently place her in her seat. He held her there while she grabbed the safety harness.

"[I could have done this myself]," she said in Tseri[gulp]uu.

"[I know, but I wanted to make sure you were in place before the boss came in, so you wouldn't bump into each other. Look. Here he comes.]" As she strapped herself in, Megamind floated by the window, against the background of the mostly-dark Earth. He was curled up as if doing a somersault, spinning madly, bumping into the wall of his bubble every once in a while, and it looked like he was laughing. a few minutes later, he appeared above the passenger compartment.

"[Catch me]." he said, holding out his arms to Roxanne. For a moment, both she and Minion were afraid he was going to barrel into her, but he pushed off gently and glided to her.

As their arms went around each other, he let the back of her seat take his momentum so that they ended up in a stationary hug, which proceeded into a very active kiss. When he broke off and settled into his seat, she saw a brainbot hovering outside the window with a bottle of champagne in one grasper.

"Are all systems go, Minion?" the blue man asked in English.

"Affirmative, Sir."

"Then will you do the honors, Roxanne?"

"Sure. I hereby dub thee Adventure." The brainbot smashed the bottle against the hull just below the windows. The champagne flashed into vapor droplets, spraying away in all directions along with the chunks of glass. The brainbot rose out of sight. A few minutes later, two brainbots flew into the passenger compartment and attached themselves to the hull on the curve above Minion on either side of the highest point of the window. The mechanical hands worked the controls. The ship began to turn away from Earth, aiming just to one side of the thickest part of the Milky Way, as the stereo began to play "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf. Roxanne and Megamind held hands, their hearts racing and their smiles as wide as their facial muscles allowed.

The beginnings of acceleration pressed them into their seats. A screen mounted behind Minion's seat came to life, showing the view behind them, just the Moon at first, but then the crescent Earth as well, shrinking with distance. As the acceleration increased, they released their hands and put them on the armrests of their acceleration couches, knowing that if they didn't, it would really hurt when the g-forces got serious. After a few minutes, the Sun became visible in one corner of the screen. Minion let the song play three times while they were pressed harder and harder into the cushions behind them. At the end of the third, he threw a switch. The windows and the screen went black. They were weightless again.

"[We are now in Wormhole Space]," the fish said. "[Have fun, you two.]" A wall rose out of the floor, dividing the compartment into two with Minion, the brainbots and the controls on one side, Megamind and Roxanne and the screen on the other. Steppenwolf got fainter and fainter and when the wall met the hull above them, there was silence.

"Stereo," said Megamind. The screen displayed a set of stereo controls. "Play 'Stir It Up'," he said and the song he had named, by Bob Marley and the Wailers, began to play at a soft volume. Roxanne had once told him that this was the sexiest song she knew, and each of them had, at some point in their five weeks of marriage, played it to get the other in the mood. Not that it was needed this time. Zero-gravity sex was something both of them had fantasized about. The wall between them and Minion was installed specifically to give them the necessary privacy.

"My place or yours?" she asked.

"How about this? We'll get out of our seats and fasten the harnesses and we'll use yours to stow our clothes and mine if we need something to hang onto."

"Sounds good." They unstrapped, rose from their seats, turned and clipped the straps over the empty places where they had been. He removed his belt and holster and tucked them under one of the straps of her harness. Then on second thought, he took it out again, reached around behind and under her seat, wrapped the belt a couple of times around the anchors that held the seat to the floor, and buckled it so that his ray gun was under the seat where they'd be very unlikely to bump into it by accident. While he was doing that, she unzipped the back of his costume and began to push it off his shoulders, while keeping one leg tucked under her harness to give herself leverage. As he straightened up, he let her pull the sleeves off his arms from behind, using both of her hand at once so that the front of her jumpsuit, a velour that matched her eyes, was pressed against his back. He made a little purring sound as she kissed the back of his neck. Then she took hold of the fabric at his waist and pulled the rest of the costume (including his black skivvies) down over his slender blue hips and thighs, stopping at his knees. Each of them bent down, unbuckled and removed one of his boots and the accompanying sock. Naked, he tucked his costume away and turned to face her. They moved into each other's arms, their eyes meeting, their lips smiling with pure love. She kissed his collar bone; he took her earlobe in his mouth. They nuzzled and fondled and made little "Mmm" noises, holding onto each other a little more firmly than usual to prevent being pushed away from each other by the pressure of their other touches. He drew back just enough to unbutton the jumpsuit and she held his shoulders to help him. Then she moved her hands to his waist so he could push the velour off her shoulders and observe (purely for research purposes, of course) the way her breasts behaved under weightless conditions. Her modest cup size meant that he could get almost a whole breast in his mouth; he proceeded to demonstrate that ability, first with the left breast, then with the right, with plenty of tongue action. He slid the garment down her body, following it with his mouth, teasing her by giving her genitals nothing but a quick kiss in passing, then proceeding down her thighs, knees, calves, ankles. Her shoes were sticky-soled rock climbing shoes. The laces went through nine pairs of eyelets; they took almost as long to remove as Megamind's boots had.

Once her garments were tucked in beside his, they moved over to his seat. He leaned his back into it and hooked his arms under the shoulder straps. With no need to keep their balance, she found that she could use almost any part of her body to caress any part of his. She experimented with this new capability for quite a while, and he responded in kind. Then she wrapped her legs around his thighs and began to play with his naughty bits, observing the way they moved without gravity to bias them in any one direction. He was soon very hard. She slid up his body, took the base of his erection with one hand and held it while she slid herself onto him.

The rhythm was odd at first. They were used to moving with force on the upthrust, then letting gravity do all the work on the downstroke. Making an equal effort in both directions was new to them. However, they were both fast learners and Roxanne was getting very close to being the first Earth woman to have an orgasm in Wormhole Space when Minion's voice interrupted, shouting first in Tseri[gulp]uu, then in English. "Dmë[click]! Stop! Stop right now!"

"Why, Minion?!" Megamind demanded to know.

"The oxygen's being used up too fast." The couple's irritation turned quickly to fear.

"What? Show me the readout." Up to this point, he and Roxanne had remained joined, but now they separated, both turning to the screen, which showed several digital numbers.

"History," he ordered, and columns of smaller numbers appeared. He scrolled downward, looking all the way to the beginning of the columns. "The deviation began before we ever came aboard," he said.

"So are the brainbots taking more oxygen than you thought?" Roxanne asked.

"Possibly, possibly not. It began between eleven and midnight, about the time Minion's spare suits came aboard. Brainbots, infrared scan on the cargo carrier with Minion's spare suits in it. The most likely explanation is that something is going on in that one, either combustion or respiration. Either one will produce enough heat to show up on a scan."

"But, Sir, there's nothing flammable in there, and respiration implies something alive, which means something that stowed away. If we'd had any mass beyond what we planned for, it would have affected fuel usage, and that's right where it's supposed to be."

At that point the scan finished and they all watched in silence. An infrared scan through multiple layers of cargo doesn't have very high resolution, but in this case the shape it showed was so familiar that they didn't need fine details.

"Wayne," Roxanne whispered half to herself.

Megamind turned and shouted at the wall behind them. "You superpowered idiot! Didn't you know that the air supply in a sealed space like this is finite? And that your presence as a stowaway would not have been allowed for when we set it up?"

"Sir, getting mad is almost as bad as sex when it comes to using up more oxygen than necessary."

The blue man put his face in his hands. "I know," he said despairingly, "but how can I possibly calm down? I'd need strong drugs, and that's something I didn't think to pack."

"I've got some," said Roxanne.

"What?" both aliens said, almost in unison.

"It's called Allerquil. It's antihistamine with codeine. It's the only way I ever get any sleep during pollen season. Where's my luggage?"

"In the compartment right over your head," said Minion. Megamind was already reaching up. He pushed a dark spot and the whole 'ceiling' of the little compartment opened. In one half of it, Roxanne's familiar suitcases were visible. She pulled out the biggest one, unzipped it and started digging, ignoring the way the entire top layer of her possessions were floating away. She had brought a year's supply, twelve bottles, just in case there was something on Harolup that she was deeply allergic to. She got out one.

"Here it is." She turned to her blue beloved. "I usually take two and it puts me right to sleep."

"Then I would say take three. We want a really deep sleep that will reduce our metabolism as much as is safe." While she had found the pills, he had fetched a squeeze bottle of water. "I shall do the same."

"Wayne," called the fish while Roxanne opened the bottle and pulled out three pills. "Can you hear us?"

"I hear you." The erstwhile hero's voice was faint. Roxanne swapped the pill bottle for the water bottle, popped the first pill, sucked water and swallowed. "Have you ever had Allerquil?" Megamind was reading the label on the pill bottle.

"Never."

"There's a formula here based on weight," said the blue man. "What do you weigh?"

"Three ten."

"By the formula, a normal dose for you would be three, so I would say take five. You want a deeper than normal sleep."

"Sure. How do I get it? Just push everything aside and come to you?"

"We'll have the trouble-spotter find you. It seems approopriate."

Roxanne, done taking her pills, was curious. "Trouble-spotter?" Megamind put all three pills in his mouth, took the water bottle back from her, drank and swallowed with a large gulp.

"I'll show you," said Minion. "Just a sec." The wall came down an inch. A thing like an insect flew through the gap. When it flew close, skillfully avoiding the floating clothes and toiletries, she saw that it was a tiny robot composed mostly of air jets aimed in all six possible directions, with a camera eye like a black glass bead and a finger-length antenna protruding at an angle between two of the jets. Megamind held a pill between his thumb and forefinger. The trouble-spotter came close, took it from him with tiny graspers, and flew "up" the passageway to the airlock. "Let us know when you get the first one," the fish added.

"Roxanne," said her husband. "In your experience, how long does this stuff take to take effect?"

"Fifteen or twenty minutes."

"Then let's spend it putting away all your stuff so we don't have things settling on our faces while we sleep."

It was a clumsy job, gathering the escaped contents of her suitcase and putting it all back. Without gravity, there was no natural reason for any of it to stay in the suitcase, so she ended up zipping the lid most of the way shut, leaving just an corner that could be lifted. Many garments that she had carefully folded when she'd packed on Earth now got shoved in any old way. She ended up staying by the suitcase while he bounced around the compartment, grabbing things out of the air and tossing them to her. Every once in a while the trouble-spotter would come back and take another pill from him. It flew off with the fifth one just as they were finishing up. The pill bottle was the last thing to go in before she zipped up. Then they pushed the suitcase back into the compartment, shut it, and descended to Megamind's seat.

"Should we put our clothes back on?" she asked as he unfastened the harness.

"Let's not. If we're still unconscious when we get there, the medical people will want a look at us first, and if we're already naked, it will make their job a little easier. Besides, I want to be close to you while we fall asleep."

And if we're dead when we get there, they'll have the consolation prize of an alien autopsy, she thought. That was the unspoken fear. The drug might save them, and they'd wake up on Harolup, or it might not be enough, and they'd never wake up at all. Megamind settled into his seat, she sat on his lap, and he clipped the straps around both of them.

"Vit o[squish] Amnang öu."

"I love you, Roxanne."

"No regrets."

"None. This has been the very best five weeks of my life. I sometimes wonder how Harolup itself can possibly live up to my anticipation of it. And, of course, Harolup has brought me you, because if they had not contacted me, I might never have told you of my feelings for you, never discovered that you returned them, and never held you naked in my arms."

Roxanne decided that he was talking too much. She shut his mouth with hers. They exchanged no more words in the time before they fell asleep.

###

Waking up after a night on Allerquil was always a long, slow process for Roxanne. She was in a gravity field and at first she thought she was still single and back in her apartment. The insides of her eyelids looked reddish brown, which meant she was someplace well lit. She wondered for a moment whether she had slept through her alarm.  
Then the events of the last few months came back to her. I'm alive! We made it! Even though her body wasn't really ready, sheer curiosity forced her eyes open. The ceiling above her was curved silvery metal. There was a screen above her; she was looking at it almost edge on, so she couldn't tell what it was displaying. To her left was a wall with another screen on it, displaying Tseri[gulp]uu text and graphics that included a simplified cartoon of a heart that beat in rhythm with her own. At the foot of the bed were two strangers, one male Yi[gulp]vi and one Opuulu. (She had no idea what gender distinctions the Opuulu had.) The Yi[gulp]vi's clothing and the Opuulu's suit were both the same color blue as the Yi[gulp]vi's skin. Both were looking at her with contained eagerness. At the same time, she saw that she was still naked. Her first impulse was to cover herself, but her limbs still felt like they were made of lead, so she didn't move. The two glanced at the screen.

"I'm sorry to startle you," the Yi[gulp]vi said in English. "I'm your translator. Please tell me your symptoms so I can tell the doctor."


	9. Chapter 9

Roxanne's translator was named Ivri[click] Tsveö, and he turned out to be a great help in spite of the fact that he knew English only from Earth broadcasts, so there were some gaps in his vocabulary. He was very helpful with medical and health terms, which she hadn't gotten to during her five weeks of studying Tseri[gulp]uu on Earth. She didn't know the words for 'groggy' or 'nausea', although she could say 'dry mouth' and 'no energy'. She was also able to assure the doctor, in Tseri[gulp]uu, that these were all familiar aftereffects of the drug she'd taken and that they normally passed after half an hour to an hour. (Actually, she said between one and three nwÿeh, which were intervals of about twenty-three minutes. A standard day in Me Weä [Squish]iyey (as opposed to the local day on any given planet) was divided into sixty-four nwÿeh.) Then the doctor, whose name was Anyöp Lei, did some of the things doctors did on Earth (looking in her ear and her eye, having her take a few deep breaths) and some they didn't (having her drink water and watching the screen above her head while she did it). The mechanical hands were blue, rubbery and, except for the lack of things like creases and fingernails, looked and worked like natural Yi[gulp]vi hands. The water was in a hose with a nipple on the end, in a reel on the side of the bed where she could get at it any time. It was a good thing to remember the next time she was in a bed in the medical area, but by the time the exam was over, she was feeling recovered enough that she didn't want to stay in that one. When Tsveö asked her if she had any questions, she started with two:

"Is my husband all right?"

"He's still sleeping."

"Can I go to him?"

"Sure. I'll take you." The doctor started removing all the little sensors stuck to her. (They were transparent except for tiny embedded silver wires and had been put on while she was asleep, so she hadn't noticed them.)

"What about Menang?"

"He's fine. He's with Amnang." The Yi[gulp]vi opened a cabinet and brought out a bag about the size of an Earth bed pillow but lumpier.

"And the cyborg cores?"

"All three thousand one hundred twenty-four are fine, according to Menang, and the eight that came with full equipment are already active."

"Great. And what about the, ah, other person on board with us?"

"The Glau is also still asleep. We're building a prison for him." The doctor finished and stepped back. Tsveö brought her the bag. It contained her clothes and shoes.

"How do you keep somebody with his powers in prison?" she asked as she dressed.

"The prison will be a fragile bubble in space. If he tries to move it, it will burst. The Glau need to breathe just like we do."

"Are we in space or on a planet?"

"We're in Harolup High Orbit. Your starship is in our docking bay, being unloaded. We've prepared a cabin for the three of you, for the adjustment period while we all figure out what role you're going to play here."

"Great." Fully dressed, she stood up. The doctor had apparently just stood there the whole time, but Roxanne learned later that all the Opuulu suits had little computers built in, allowing their users to take notes by sending the words directly from their brains via the antennae on top of their heads. Now the ichthyoid in the blue mechanical suit stepped forward again.

"Roxanne Ritchi," the doctor said, then continued in Tseri[gulp]uu, with Tsveö interpreting. "[It has been a privilege to be the first to examine you. When you are feeling well, please arrange for a more complete examination.]"

"I will, and thank you, Anyöp Lei."

Just outside the door, she asked Tsveö to take her to a bathroom. He led her down the hallway to a door marked with an abstract graphic that made no sense to her.

"This is a sampling toilet," he said. "I'd better come in and make sure it's set to Dispose." He led her inside. What she saw there resembled no toilet she'd ever seen. It looked like a rather large person had sat down in wet clay with their legs together and the print of their thighs and buttocks had been smoothed out to a stylized generic shape, sealed and coated with shiny gray enamel. There was no hole, only a seam between the right and left halves. On the wall behind it were two dials with settings that she knew just enough of the Tseri[gulp]uu writing system to read. The one on the left was labeled Urine and its settings were Full Collection, Center Sample and Dispose. The one on the right was labeled Feces and its settings were Full Collection and Dispose. Tsveö set them both to Dispose.

"There you go," he said and turned to leave.

"Wait a minute," she said. "You have to explain to me how this thing works."

"The toilet?"

"Earth toilets aren't like this."

"Oh. Right. Well, you sit down on it and it scans you to determine how wide to open. I'm going to open it all the way so you can see." He opened a panel on the wall, pushed a dark spot and the strange seat split down the seam, the left and right halves sliding apart to display the mechanism beneath. "Normally it would only be open this wide for maintenance. Then it scans from below to find out exactly where your orifices are. Then it brings up two receptacles. A normal toilet would only have these two." He pointed to a pair of little round cylinders. "Those are the disposal tubes. The covers retract and the tubes collect your waste as you release it. But if you were providing a sample for diagnosis, these little containers would come out and catch it and send it to the lab. In either case, when you're done, there's a spray arm that comes out and sprays you with a cleaning solution and then a wiping arm that cleans you and then the spray arm comes back and sprays you with disinfectant. Then you're done. You put your hands in that slot in the far wall to clean them." He pushed the same dark spot and it closed up.

"Wow," she said as he was shutting the panel. "So what does it do with menstrual blood?"

"With what kind of blood? I don't know that word."

"Oh, right, that wouldn't be explained in a broadcast. Look, in the Adventure, there's a medical terminology database. Go look up menstruation." She spelled it out for him, then hustled him out the door. Once she was alone, she turned back to the gray seat. _Well, I guess I"m going to try this thing._ She peeled her jumpsuit down to her thighs and sat down on the thing. For two seconds, nothing happened. Then the halves slid apart until they were holding her open a couple of inches. There was another brief pause and then a humming noise under her. She wasn't sure it was ready for her yet, so she did nothing. A sentence in Tseri[gulp]uu appeared on the far wall at about eye level: **Release Your Waste Now**. So she did. When she was done, there was more humming and she felt herself being sprayed with a warm, wet liquid. Then, well, the wiping arm turned out to have many tiny fingers. She laughed out loud at the sensation. After three or four seconds, it withdrew. She felt a squirt of some cooling liquid and then the toilet closed up. _Man, they'd sell this thing as a sex toy on Earth_ , she thought as she pulled her jumpsuit up. She put her hands in the wall slot. They were sprayed with the same cooling liquid. When she took them out and sniffed them, she recognized the smell of alcohol disinfectant.

Tsveö was waiting outside the door, looking at a little handheld screen. "Menstruation is going to be the talk of Harolup," he said as he put it away. "Everybody pays attention to biology, so a new biological phenomenon is always of interest." They started walking back the way they came.

"Yi[gulp]vi women don't menstruate?"

"Never. If a woman has blood coming out of her vagina, it's a sign that something's wrong, probably a tumor on the uterus."

"And if a human woman doesn't menstruate, and she's not pregnant or in menopause, that's a sign that something's wrong, probably that she's not getting enough to eat." He stopped and opened a door only two down from the one she'd been in.

Her blue beloved was lying naked in a shallow transparent bathtub at table height on top of a low cabinet. Two brainbots hovered around him. They turned their eyestalks to her and bowged, but they didn't move. Minion's suit stood at the foot of the tub, bent as though to get a closer look at its contents, with the lid open. The fish himself was in the tub, resting between the blue chest and right biceps.

"Hi, Roxanne," he said as she came close. Megamind slept chest deep in the water. He had a day's growth of beard. Now that she knew to look for them, she could see several of the transparent sensors on his head, neck and torso.

"Hi, Minion. How is he?"

"Good. Remember the human medical database you got for us? I looked up the ingredients in Allerquil and when I showed the doctors here the molecular diagrams, it turned out they use all that stuff here, too. They say he's having a normal reaction and the best thing to do is just let him sleep it off. Hi, Tsveö."

"Hi, Menang," said the interpreter. "You know how to reach me if you need me?"

"Sure, and thanks."

"Yeah, thanks, Tsveö," Roxanne said. "You're welcome," he replied, and went out.

"One other thing the doctors said," the fish continued. "They have a lot of confidence in the healing effects of skin contact with someone the patient loves. That's why I'm in here, and they said if you were up before him, you should get in, too."

"Um, okay." She looked around. There was a row of hooks on the wall with a small stool next to it. One of the hooks held Megamind's costume; his boots were on the floor under it. She sat there and began to unlace her shoes. To cover her discomfort at taking off her clothes in Minion's presence, she said, "These people really don't have any nudity taboos at all, do they?"

"No, and I don't get the ones humans have, even after all the years I spent on Earth. They asked me to explain why humans wear bathing suits to swim and I couldn't. Don't be surprised if they ask you."

"Huh. You know, I'm not sure whether I could explain it, either. I know it's not universal on Earth, or even in Western Civilization. The ancient Greeks didn't have it. Let me think about it."

"Well, don't think too hard right now. You're supposed to be focusing on loving thoughts."

"That's not too hard. I'm so grateful that we're all alive. Even the cyborgs made it." She had her shoes and socks off. The time had come to unbutton her jumpsuit. She had an impulse to turn her back on Minion to do it, but fought it down, knowing that it was not just about the nudity taboo, but about not having her falsie-stuffed bra on. She had gone through the same thing on her wedding night; letting a new person see her real breasts was always hard. Still, in this society she figured that everyone would see them sooner or later. She'd just have to stiffen up her spine and get through it.

"Yeah, even Wayne made it, the jerk," said Minion, oblivious to her discomfort. "One of the people I talked to while you were asleep was Sa[squish]ikwuë Nawa. You know, the narrator of the message that started all this. He's a pilot, and he said I showed great forbearance in not stuffing Wayne out the airlock when we came out of Wormhole Space and he was still out. He said that's what he would have done." While he spoke, she got out of her jumpsuit and panties and hung them up.

"I might have done the same thing," she said, moving the stool over to the tub opposite Minion. "But afterward I think I'd regret it. Wayne has so much to give, and if he really gets how big a mistake he made and really wants to atone, I think he should get a chance." She was kind of surprised at hearing herself say this. Her last thought about Wayne onboard the Adventure had been _If we live, I'm gonna kick his ass into the Sun_. Maybe the instruction to focus on loving thoughts was working. She climbed in and settled herself in under Megamind's arm. The water was warm but not quite as warm as she expected. She slid one hand under her husband's back, the other across his chest, and kissed his blue neck just below the hinge of his jaw. He looked so vulnerable. She wanted to do everything, marshal all her resources to make sure he was all right. It struck her as ironic that the best thing she could be doing for him was reclining in warm water with her arms around him and her mind on her love for him.

"Vit o[squish] Amnang öu," she whispered, settling her head on his shoulder.

"[Click]at o[squish] Amnang öu," Minion whispered from his other shoulder. "You're gonna be okay, Boss."

###

When Wayne woke up, he was still weightless. He was in a sort of wraparound hammock in a perfectly spherical room only a little longer than he was tall. There were furnishings of various sorts protruding into the room, most with labels in English. One said "Airlock. Do not open. This door is only usable by persons with respiration gear." Another said "Zero-gravity Toilet. Follow the directions or clean up the mess yourself." There was a sheet of metal with many squeeze bottles stuck to it by their bottoms, pointing their nipple tops at him. Along one edge was a label that said "These bottles contain liquid food and drink. Their bases are magnetic. This is the only place you can set them down where they'll stay. Squeeze carefully while sucking the tip." The implication behind these labels was clear even to his codeine-befogged brain: they didn't think he was capable of figuring anything out for himself. Considering the circumstances of his arrival, he couldn't blame them. Worst of all was the one directly overhead. It said "You are in a self-contained fragile habitat. The force needed to move it from its mooring is greater than the force that will cause you to break through the wall and lose all your air." In other words, this was a prison and any attempt to escape would be fatal. He looked through the wall and out into the stars. To his right was a yellow-white glowing sun. Directly below him, a pole about a foot in diameter extended from his habitat maybe a quarter-mile to a cluster of metal bulbs. Inside them, he could see people, mostly Megamind's and Minion's people, tiny with distance, going about their lives. Other poles extended from it and along all of them, including the one he was attached to, were slightly curved disks facing the sun; solar panels, he guessed. Beyond it and slightly to one side was the planet, about three-quarters lit, looking very Earthlike. A large moon was peeping out from behind it.

His mouth was bone dry. Flying over to the bottles, he studied their labels. Most of them were long and vague. "Fresh water shellfish broth". "Puree of aromatic lowland herbs". "Fermented river delta thatch seed sprouts." That last one sounded like it might be kind of like beer, but the next row said "Water" and at the moment, that sounded better. He pulled one off the steel, sucked it dry, slid the empty through the elasticized hole below the sign that said "Insert used containers through this hole," pulled another one and finished half of it. Sticking it back in its place, he used the toilet, following the instructions to the letter, including the one that said "When you finish, you are expected to disinfect both your hands and your organs of elimination." There were wall dispensers with cleaning solution (slightly slippery, it smelled of iodine), wipes and disinfectant that turned out to be good old familiar alcohol gel, the kind sold as hand sanitizer back home. _Did I just think of Earth as home? Am I already homesick? I just got here._ But he hadn't expected to arrive with "Fuck-up" stamped on his forehead. He'd planned on remaining undetected through the journey and slipping out of the cargo carrier after it was unloaded from the ship. Then he'd hide, watching and listening until someone was in danger, and he'd rescue them. That was how heroes appeared on Earth, and he had planned to be a hero in his new environment. He still hoped to redeem himself somehow by the use of his powers, but that could only happen if someone trusted him enough to let him out of here. There was a screen, but it seemed to be the only thing in the cell with no instructions posted on it. No visible controls, either. He touched it. Nothing. Voice controls, maybe? "Computer on," he said. No response. "System on." Nothing. "Screen on." It blinked to life, showing him white text on a black background. "I'm an automatic response system," the text read. "I can answer a range of questions, transmit communication and summon a live person if appropriate."

"Where am I?" he asked.

"You are in a confining habitat attached to Harolup High Orbit, an artificial satellite in orbit around the planet Harolup, which is in orbit around Iota Delphinus, a G-type star nine point seven three light years from Earth."

"Where is Roxanne Ritchi?"

"In Harolup High Orbit."

"Is she all right?"

"She is in good health."

"What about Megamind and Minion?"

"The individuals known by those names in broadcasts from Earth are both in Harolup High Orbit and in good health." He sighed with relief. I'm not a murderer. Unless they count brainbots.

"What about the other living things that were aboard the Adventure?"

"All cyborgs and living cyborg components are intact. The complete cyborgs are functional and two of them are in space near Harolup High Orbit. The rest are in Harolup High Orbit." Great. So I'm down to property damage and reckless endangerment, or whatever the terms are here. Now how do I ask about my case? What terms would this machine understand? He thought about it for a moment.

"Have any official decisions been made about me?"

"The current orders of the Commander of Harolup High Orbit are to hold you in this confining habitat. From your awakening, you will be left alone for six hours to ensure that your mind is no longer affected by the drugs you took aboard the Adventure. After that, you will be available for questioning until the Commander concludes that enough information has been collected to make a decision about your future status on Harolup."

"How long have I been awake?"

"Approximately seventeen minutes."

"What is the name of my species?"

"Your species is called the Glau, singular and plural."

"What can you tell me about the Glau?"

A table of contents in very small letters filled the screen. For the first time since his arrival, Wayne smiled.

  
  



	10. Chapter 10

Megamind woke slowly. He had a headache and his stomach was both empty and upset, so he couldn't be in Heaven, but he could feel Minion on one side of him and Roxanne on the other, so it couldn't be Hell. Therefore he was alive and so were they. While that wasn't Heaven, it was a very, very good thing that he hadn't been at all sure of. He opened his eyes with a smile. Minion's suit was standing in its tank access position at the foot of the tub. Next to it stood another Opuulu in a suit. The suit was very simple and utilitarian, and mostly blue. Its occupant was twice the size of Minion. He knew that size indicated age; this fish must, therefore, be considerably older than Minion. A couple of brainbots hovered on either side of him. They bowged.

"Daddy's here," he reassured them. "I'm all right."

"[Welcome, Ilu Amnang,]" the stranger said. "[I am Anyöp Lei, the senior doctor here in Harolup High Orbit. Please describe your symptoms.]"

"[Well, let's see. Mild headache, immense relief at being alive, some stomach discomfort, great affection and a disinclination to move which may be an aftereffect of the drugs and may also be a response to this perfect situation in which I find myself.]" As he'd hoped, the medical fish chuckled. Roxanne gave a little giggle, too. Minion just snuggled against his ribs.

Then Anyöp Lei said "[Please sit up and I will do the manual examination.]" Megamind and Roxanne sat up together. The doctor did the same examination they had done on Roxanne. "[It looks like the aftereffects of your experiences during the journey are typical and will wear off without treatment. However, like your Opuulu here, you have a longstanding case of inlander's malnutrition. Don't be surprised at getting special food in the dining room for a while. Roxanne, may I see your hand?]" Roxanne held one hand out. The blue rubbery mechanical hands turned it palm up. She had been lying in the water for over three hours. Her hands were very wrinkled from the long soak. "[Ah. You have immersion texturing, probably indicating that your species, like your husband's, is evolved for an amphibious life, which would suggest that you might also be suffering from inlander's malnutrition.]"

At that point, she stopped them and had Megamind translate the term, which he defined for her. "It means a dietary deficiency resulting from not getting enough of the nutrients that are plentiful in aquatic foods but not in land foods. Considering that a tuna sandwich for lunch and a fillet of some cheap white fish for dinner once a week was all the aquatic food we got in prison, it's not too surprising."

"And the doctor thinks I -" She broke off and addressed them. "[You think I might have inlander's malnutrition?]"

"[It's possible. When the Yi[gulp]vi were at the stage of development that humans are at now, it was very widespread. We know that these two," they indicated Megamind and Minion with their eyes, "have it because they have the markers, but we don't know enough about what a healthy human is like to judge that in your case. Hmm.]" The medical Opuulu frowned a moment in thought. "[Have you ever given birth to a baby?]"

"[No.]"

"[That won't help, then. Wait. I know. The teeth. Did your last four teeth, the ones that come in when you're a young adult, come in healthy and functional?]"

"[No. They all came in crooked, and they hurt a lot. They were removed.]"

"[Then it's very likely that you have it.]"

"[But wait,]" interrupted Megamind. "[My last four teeth came in perfectly. The dentist was amazed.]"

"[The effect on the teeth is established prenatally. You were gestated and born on Lup, so you have no dental symptoms. Your wife has been malnourished, not only from conception, but for many generations back. I'm going to prescribe a remedial diet for her, too. All the details will be sent to your wrist units, which I have right here.]" A compartment opened in the chest of the blue mechanical suit. From it, they pulled out two watches. The first one was beige; they handed it to Roxanne. The second was blue; they gave it to Megamind. "[Menang, yours is already installed in your suit. And if you ever get tired of this suit and want to get a more ordinary-looking one, this one should be preserved. It's a work of art. And now, good bye.]"

All three thanked them, said goodbye in return, and the doctor went out.

"[Wrist unit,]" said Megamind, holding it up to his mouth. "[Show our location in a 3D representation of the internal layout of this satellite.]" His watch projected a hologram into the air in front of him. It showed the lobes of Harolup High Orbit, solid at first, but then its skin and all the antennae and solar panels and so forth outside it disappeared and the maze of corridors was visible, translucent, with a bright little light in one of the lobes. The whole thing was about three feet long. At the same time, Minion's suit seemed to start to straighten up, then stopped. It was left bowing a little less deeply. As its tank began to fill with water, its hands reached down, picked up Minion from the water and slipped him in through the hatch on the top. "[Higher resolution,]" Megamind commanded, and the hologram expanded until it filled one end of the room. Translucent people about half an inch tall were visible, and machines, and smaller spacecrafts in one big room in which people and machines floated rather than walked. The Adventure was visible. So were an Yi[gulp]vi couple in a small room next to it who were making love while floating. "Look, Roxanne," he said, leaping from the tub and running right into the hologram to point it out, grinning wildly. "We didn't miss our chance after all."

Roxanne smiled back, but she had already spotted, in the little glowing room, tiny figures of themselves in exactly the positions (and state of undress) they were really in, and of Anyöp Lei going down the corridor. She could see Minion's suit standing straighter as its tank filled to the top, the tiny one in the hologram moving in unison with the real one next to the tub. So that couple in the weightless part of the satellite was probably a real couple, really getting it on. Realizing that she could see anyone, anywhere on the ship, and they could all see her, at any time, no matter what she was doing, a strange combination of delight and distress overcame her, professional instincts and personal vulnerability tangling and spiraling without much recourse to logic.

"How can I be a nosy reporter in a place where there's no privacy?" she burst out. Then more calmly, "I know that doesn't make any sense. I know I couldn't expect to work as a reporter here. But being a reporter isn't just what I did for a living back on Earth. It's what I am. And with this," she gestured at the hologram, "there aren't any secrets to find out. I bet this thing has sound, too, doesn't it?"

"[Wrist unit, zoom in on the work being done in and around the Adventure, and let us hear the sounds there.]" As Megamind commanded, it was done. The Adventure grew, the rest of the habitat fading away around it, until it was a yard across and the people around it were about the size of Barbie dolls. Actually, there were only two that counted as people, one Yi[gulp]vi woman in a gray coverall with a tool belt and one Opuulu in a suit with four identical limbs, all with hands on the ends, emerging at equal intervals from a central "body" in the shape of an inner tube with the transparent tank in the middle of it, protruding on both sides. Effectively, it was identical whether seen from above or below, perfectly adapted to a weightless environment in which that distinction was meaningless. There were also two brainbots about as long as Roxanne's hand. The skin of the little starship was translucent in this hologram, and two more brainbots worked inside, releasing the cargo tie-downs on a big rectangular box and wrestling it out the hatch. This was a larger hatch than the one with the airlock attached to it that the three of them had boarded through. The cargo area was three-quarters empty already. The sound was mostly thumps and clicks, which echoed in the big hangar.

"[What's this one?]" they heard the tiny Opuulu ask.

"[Says] 'frozen food'," said the Yi[gulp]vi. "[This must be the samples of Earth food species. The bio lab people are going to go crazy over this.]"

"[Just so they leave enough so the rest of us can have a taste. Yes, sweetie, what's going on?]" A faint, high voice seemed to come from the suit.

"[Mom, he's awake! And they're all together, and guess who they're watching? You!]" There was youthful giggling in the background.

"[I guess we should take a break, then,]" the Opuulu replied. "[Can you see what camera they're centering from?]"

"[Three-fourteen, I think.]"

"[Thanks, Vri.]" The two little figures turned in the air, seemed to look right at Megamind, and called out "[Hi, Roxanne. Hi, Amnang. Hi, Menang. Can you hear us?]" At the same time, words appeared in the air above them. Roxanne's comprehension of written Tseri[gulp]uu was a little shaky, but she was pretty sure it was asking whether Megamind wanted a two-way voice connection.

"[Yes, connect,]" he said. "[Hello. We hear you just fine.]" The miniature faces lit up.

"[How do you like the brainbots?]" Minion asked.

"[They're great,]" said the tiny Yi[gulp]vi. "[Everyone is going to want brainbots.]"

"[Then we'll try to get them out where they can do some good. Hey, where is the food going?]"

"[The biology lab first. They'll study everything and make sure there's nothing in it that's bad for us, and then you can make that dinner you promised us.]"

"[Great. We'll let you get back to work now.]"

"[It was great to talk to you.]"

"[Goodbye,]" said Megamind. "[Close connection. Now show us the biology lab.]" While the hologram zoomed out from the Adventure, then zoomed in on a room full of counters and equipment, Roxanne held her own wrist up to her mouth.

"[Wrist unit,]" she asked. "[How many people are watching us right now and what percentage is that of the people watching anything and of the total population?]"

"[You are currently being observed by one hundred and ninety-three people,]" replied a slightly mechanical-sounding voice from both the wrist unit and speakers that must have been somewhere in the walls or ceiling, so that it seemed to come from nowhere in particular. "[This is ninety-one percent of those watching anything and forty-three percent of the total population.]"

"Wow," she said in English, lowering her arm. "Best audience share of my life." In the background she could hear Megamind connect with a Yi[gulp]vi in the biology lab who ordered her wrist unit to show a visual two-way connection. Her hologram, wearing a brown apron over a pale green jumpsuit and a breathing mask which somehow transmitted her voice undistorted, grew until it was the same size as his. The far wall now looked like it opened into the lab. So Roxanne had just acquired another audience member. "Makes me want to put clothes on. Minion, did you notice where the towels are?"

"They don't use towels here. What you do is stand on that little circle right there," the gorilla suit pointed to a round area of floor that was a little darker green than the rest, "and raise your arms straight up with your palms forward."

"Like Megamind does when he has the brainbots change his clothes?"

"Yeah. He programmed that signal into them because he remembered it."

Roxanne climbed out of the tub, stood on the circle and raised her arms as she had seen Megamind do. A cylinder accordioned out from the ceiling above her, coming straight down on top of her. Looking up at it, she could see that it was dark inside, with some kind of vague movement visible. Even knowing that it was safe, she nevertheless caught her breath in fear, and that turned out to be a good thing. It was lined with more of those cleaning fingers like the toilet had. It was very close in there for a moment, and she shut her eyes just in time. They dried her thoroughly on the way down, then went limp as they were drawn back up into the ceiling. When she opened her eyes again, one of the brainbots was setting the little stool down just behind her. The other one was carrying her jumpsuit in one of its graspers while holding out her panties to her with the other.

"Minion," she said. "I thought you two told the brainbots I didn't want their help getting dressed."

"We did," he said, "but they asked for an override. They want to help. It feels normal to them, and they're kind of weirded out by all the new stuff they're experiencing right now."

Roxanne sighed. "Okay. Just this once, if it'll make them feel better." She still didn't like it. Being helped to get dressed when she was perfectly capable of dressing herself just felt too princessy. But it was good to have clothes on again. While she was dressing, Megamind concluded his conversation, shut down the hologram display and turned to his companions.

"It seems that a lot of people want to meet with us for various reasons," he said.

"Yes, Sir. I was going to mention it when you asked me what was next."

"Why don't we see if we can set up a calendar?" Roxanne suggested.

###

The great bulk of the messages were invitations to come and satisfy the curiosity of various branches of the Earth Study Group and job offers from the managers of every farm, mine and wild harvesting operation, for themselves and/or as many brainbots as they could make available. The systems manager was finding that interfacing the brainbots with the rest of the habitat's network was a nontrivial task and wanted the brainbots' creators' help. Ileala-Atii, the lone Colna in Harolup space, sent Roxanne a Tseri[gulp]uu vocabulary-building game that she had found helpful, with an enthusiastic invitation to meet socially. And Sa[squish]ikwuë Nawa, Commander of Harolup High Orbit, wanted to question them about Wayne.

"Sa[squish]ikwuë Nawa," Roxanne repeated. "Wasn't he the narrator of the invitation message that got us here?"

"Yeah," replied Minion. "I talked to him when we first got here, when you were still asleep. This habitat was made by welding the six biggest spaceships together, and the pilots of those ships rotate through the job of Commander. It's his turn."

"You know," she said. "I think we should start with a whole day of just learning the basics: manners and customs, background information, the stuff everybody else knows."

"[Wrist unit,]" Megamind said. "[In what situations do the Yi[gulp]vi customarily wear clothes and in what situations do they not?]"

"[The Yi[gulp]vi wear clothes when doing work that does not involve getting wet, during governmental and legal activities, on ceremonial occasions and when transiting to or from any of these. Clothes are not worn by Yi[gulp]vi when at leisure, doing work that involves getting wet or receiving bodily services. This refers to ordinary clothes; specialized garments that provide protection or extended ability are considered to be equipment, not clothes.]"

"What's the Tseri[gulp]uu word for privacy?" Roxanne asked her companions. "I want to ask it if there are any rules of privacy in this society."  
Megamind and Minion looked at each other for a moment.

"I don't know," replied Minion. "I'm not sure there is one."

Megamind spoke. "[Wrist unit, is there a way of expressing in Tseri[gulp]uu the English concept] privacy?"

"[To the extent that] privacy [is understood, it seems to have two meanings. One is the right to personal self-determination. Its extent is different in English-speaking cultures than in ours, but the concept is essentially the same. The other is a right to conceal certain categories of information about oneself. This is apparently a strategy for self-protection from the irrational reactions and attitudes common among humans, but its misuse is the single most frequent source of plot complications in their drama, so the problems caused by such secretiveness are known to them. Thus, expert opinion is that, as humans advance, it will be recognized as pathological and abandoned.]"

"Wow," she said. "That was an anthropology lesson all by itself. [Wrist unit, is everyone in Harolup High Orbit allowed to look at anyone they want at any time?]"

"[Yes.]"

"[How many people watched me use the toilet?]"

"[Two hundred and seven.]"

"You're so cute when you blush," said Megamind, watching Roxanne turn bright red.

"Wanting privacy may be considered pathological here, but I can't just abandon it in one day. Hey, [Wrist unit, why does this room have a door?]"

"[To prevent transmission of unwanted sound, to contain dropped or thrown objects, and to prevent air loss in the event of a hull breach.]"

"Now that you mention it," said the blue man, "[Wrist unit, show me the location of the nearest toilet.]" The word [Here] appeared on a section of wall next to the hook where his costume, minus the cape, hung. He walked up to it; the word disappeared and a section of wall slid aside, revealing a toilet like the one Roxanne had used earlier slid out. "I wonder how much of an audience I'm going to have?"

"Probably not as big as mine. You're physically one of them, so there won't be the same novelty factor."

He strolled in, the door closed and the word [Occupied] appeared on it. While he was in there, Roxanne had the wrist unit show her where all the cameras, microphones, speakers and hologram projectors in the room were, with their numbers. She had noticed that the two people unloading the Adventure knew what camera to look into by number, so she figured that this was something she should start learning right away.

After he came out and the brainbots dressed him, they had the wrist units show them where their room was. They walked to it through the public corridors, which had only a few people when they emerged but quickly became more crowded, mainly with people who wanted to welcome them. Roxanne was comfortable with this kind of public attention and glad that she had learned enough Tseri[gulp]uu to do the simple greetings appropriate to the situation. The other two were sort of dazed. They had been famous in Metro City, but they had never known this kind of positive feedback. As more and more people came out to meet them, their progress got slower and slower and their grins got bigger and bigger. A child of about two, carried by a woman, asked "[Roxanne Ritchi, can I feel your head beard?]"

There was general laughter and Roxanne got points for graciousness by lowering her head to the little hands. She expected that the child would pull too hard and was braced for the pain, but the woman said "[Carefully, Dïü... That's enough,]" and she raised her head untugged. When they got to their room, which was almost as small as the sick bay rooms had been, they had to ask where the furniture was. The wrist units revealed that the bed was a hammock and the chairs and tables folded flat and it was all stored in the walls, along with their personal luggage and two brainbot charging racks. Roxanne asked where the cameras were, then asked if there was a penalty for blocking the lenses with clothes. She learned that interfering with the cameras, like interfering with any other part of the safety system, would result psychological testing and possible remedial treatment, in addition to what the system called the inevitable social stigma. Roxanne was just beginning to resign herself to the fact that her and her husband's sex life was going to have an audience from now on when there was a knock, not on the door they'd come through, but on the door opposite it, which they hadn't yet investigated, but which they knew opened into one of the habitat's two big pool rooms. When Minion got close to it, it slid open, revealing a naked Ivri[click] Tsveö, who wondered if they'd like to get undressed and come to lunch.


	11. Chapter 11

Wayne spent the first hour just on the physical characteristics of his people. He learned that his powers were pretty normal for his kind, that their limits were about what he had discovered for himself. What was not normal was having them active from infancy. Puberty was the normal age for acquiring the powers; early activation would occur when a breastfeeding mother was in a constant state of fear; breakdown products of adrenaline would pass to the child in the milk. The child would then grow up with a hyper-mature appearance but without sexual function and would need medical treatments to truly reach puberty. He paid special attention to those medical treatments, to the symptoms of power deactivation and to the description of a normal Glau sex life. He also learned of two new powers, one that he hadn't realized was unique to the Glau and one that he hadn't even guessed at.

He'd been fascinated by the subtle directionless depth and texture of Wormhole Space and surprised that Megamind had not showed the slightest interest in it even before Roxanne began to undress. He now knew that neither Megamind nor Minion (whose peoples, written as the Yi#vi and the Opuulu, formed a single civilization called the Tseri#uu) could even see it; Wormhole Space looked completely black to them. Not only was the ability to see in Wormhole Space unique to the Glau, so was the ability to change direction within it. The other species, and the Glau themselves when their powers were inactive, would be killed instantly if the vessel they were riding in did anything other than stay the course it had been on when it left normal space. For this reason, rescue and law enforcement vessels patrolling Wormhole Space had always been piloted by Glau.

"It was one of these patrol ships that initiated the sequence of events that led to the survival of remnants of the Five Peoples after the destruction of the Home Star Group." When he read this sentence, Wayne immediately shifted his line of inquiry to that history. "Several Glau passengers aboard passenger liner 238, bound from Abru to the Glaupunk Quadrant of the 57 Draconis star system, observed a small vessel on an unregistered course in Wormhole Space just before emergence into Tseri#uu space." At this point, Wayne backed out of the historical narrative, looked up "Glaupunk Quadrant" and learned that it meant a planet or group of planets populated mainly by Glau located in a star system claimed by another space-faring civilization. They were mainly mining colonies; the Glau were better at mining gas giant planets than any machinery. These colonies were typically networks of artificial habitats floating in the thick, gaseous atmospheres of the planets they mined. The one orbiting 57 Draconis, which was also the Sun of Lup, the Tseri#uu homeworld, had been about three hundred years old and had a population of about two million. He returned to the story of its end.

"Assuming that this unknown vessel was off course, they notified Wormhole Space Rescue Tug 18. The one-man crew of the tug, upon intercepting the vessel, finding it unmanned and recognizing that it did not resemble any known spacecraft, delivered it, not to the local Glau authorities, but to Lup High Orbit 3, headquarters of the codebreaker unit of the Tseri#uu Interstellar Forces. It took the code breakers seventeen days to translate the message carried by the unknown vessel. The message read as follows:

**After consideration of all reports, the Expansion Manager has chosen to use the Star Eater, recognizing that it will result in the destruction of fourteen habitable planets. The potential value of these planets is less important than the fact that their present inhabitants possess conventional military capabilities significantly more advanced than ours. If they were to learn of our existence, they could take from us everything of value including our lives. All units are therefore ordered to return to their Exploration Centers. Initiation of the Star Eater process will not be held up for those who fail in promptness.**

Immediately after translation, Lup High Command sent out the following orders: all unarmed vessels with interstellar capability were to leave the Home Star Group immediately. Those with Tseri#uu pilots were ordered to Harolup; those with Glau pilots to Imbarnan; those with Colna pilots to Chria!eyi and those with Equa pilots to Bimbimin-Oach. Armed space ships were assigned places in a defensive three-dimensional grid designed to maximize the likelihood that at least one would be near enough to spot the Star Eater, whatever it turned out to be, and to both attack it immediately and call nearby ships to the attack. If they failed to stop the Star Eater, any surviving vessels were to follow the unarmed ones." A list followed, of the fourteen starships that made it to Harolup, their passengers and crews. (Wayne skimmed over it, with a mental note to come back to it, since there were people on it that he would probably be dealing with.) Twelve were civilian interstellar vessels, the last two military survivors. These two reported that several unauthorized launches had been seen taking off from the surface of Lup and from the Glaupunk. Too small to hold an adult of either the mammalian species or the Colna, at least two are now known to have carried infants to Earth, one a Tseri#uu pair, the other a Glau. These three have gained enough notoriety on Earth that their activities have been documented in broadcasts, but there is no reason to assume that they are the only survivors to have reached Earth. A search of the oceans might be particularly fruitful." Then there was a list of other planets, inhabited by civilizations without interstellar flight, to which young/small survivors might have been sent.

_So that's where I came from. And why. Harolup is where I am. It looks like Imbarnan is where I want to be, the last place in the universe where there are other Glau. What does this computer know about Imbarnan?_ The answer turned out to be Not Much. It was another Earth-like world, its ecosystem in a stage characterized by gigantic animals - not dinosaurs, exactly, but creatures that functioned about the same. And it was seventy-seven light years from Harolup, eighty-one from Earth. The forty-three Glau, sixteen Colna and three Equa who had left Harolup for Imbarnan fifty-six years ago had not even arrived yet. Since Glau life expectancy was about 110 years, minus time spent in superspeed, he could expect to die of old age about the time they found out about him. Unless he found a way to go to them.

Those travelers from Harolup had prepared for three contingencies. The one they were hoping for was, of course, to find other Glau survivors. If they found the place uninhabited, they planned to turn around and go back to Harolup. It was the third possibility that caught his attention. The Star Eater people might have found it first. They were known to have a goal of expanding onto Earth-like planets. They might already be colonizing Imbarnan. In that case, the expedition would become an intelligence-gathering mission. One of the travelers was a Glau interplanetary fighter pilot, Khenhig il Daniikyen, one of the two survivors of the failed battle to save their star. Inside their large habitat-ship, they carried another spacecraft, il Daniikyen's tiny, swift, agile one-man fighter, which had been fitted with Tseri#uu stealth technology in Harolup High Orbit. The plan was that the habitat-ship would come out of Wormhole Space thirty-one standard light-days from Imbarnan. Then il Daniikyen, in his fighter, would return to Wormhole Space and maneuver so that he would come out again near Imbarnan on the trajectory he would have been on if he had come straight from the destroyed star group. That was in case the Star Eater people had some way of detecting him in spite of having the stealth mode engaged. If he found the planet empty or populated by a Glau colony, he was to return to the habitat-ship immediately. If he found an unknown people, he was to gather as much data as he could in the three hours before his little ship needed refueling. The habitat-ship carried enough fuel for five such expeditions, plus enough to return all of them to Harolup.

When he read the description of the plan, the hero in Wayne responded. He wanted to be Khenhig il Daniikyen, flying a fighter jet that Megamind's people had made invisible, going up against the monsters who had destroyed both their homeworlds. He asked the computer for information on il Daniikyen, and the computer readily obeyed. Beside a table of contents that included chapters on the other Glau's ancestry and medical history as well as his education and military record, it showed a picture that made Wayne blink in surprise. _Why didn't I expect that my species would include black people?_ The man in the picture looked more South Indian than African American, with wispy, wavy hair that reminded Wayne of Beethoven and a long Arabic-looking nose. He stood at attention (the required military stance seemed to be the same all over the galaxy) in front of a skinless vessel that was little more than a structure of poles about as thick as his ankle, holding together various components that he recognized from the Adventure (the pilot's seat mounted on the front, a large jet on the back, several smaller maneuvering jets, the Wormhole Shifter, air tanks, etc.) and several things he didn't, although one of them reminded him vaguely of the thing the Invisible Car had that other cars didn't. _There isn't any canopy, just a helmet connected by a hose to the air tanks._ When he thought about it a moment, it made sense. Invulnerability meant there was no need to fear the explosive decompression that would kill any other species, and in vacuum there's no wind resistance, so why bother with glass? _I want to fly one of those._

###

"Are there insects in this?" Roxanne was staring into her bowl. She was naked in warm water again, hip deep, sitting at a table that stood with its single leg rising from the bottom on which she sat and its round, transparent top at the height of her elbows. Megamind and Ivri[click] Tsveö sat at the table with her. Minion and Tsveö's Opuulu, Ivri[click] Naüÿng, were in the water under the table. At the fourth "place" was a floating container with their food in it. All around them in the big pool room were groups, large and small, around tables like theirs. The place didn't echo as much as she'd expected, probably because of the many colorful cloth things that hung from the ceiling. It was the only place in the habitat where she'd seen bright colors. She'd intended to ask about them, but then had been distracted by Tsveö's and Naüÿng's explanation and demonstration of the traditional beginning of a sit-down meal, with a dish of raw scallop-like shellfish. Each Yi[gulp]vi would take one, open it, hold it in the water and his or her Opuulu would eat the meat from the shell. It was a reenactment, he'd explained, of the earliest co-operation between the two species: the Opuulu with their bioluminescent appendages (called blüÿps in Tseri[gulp]uu) could find shellfish even in lightless underwater caves, but couldn't open them; the Yi[gulp]vi could open them, but only if led to them by the Opuulu. Megamind had been charmed by the little ceremony, saying that it reminded him of their boyhood on Earth, when Megamind would feed Minion from his tray in the prison cafeteria. Minion felt some of the same sentiment, but he was uncomfortable being under the table. He felt like a family dog. Then Tsveö had gotten out the soup, kept hot in wide cylindrical bowls, and Naüÿng had opened a compartment underneath and begun to pull out long black ribbons of seaweed with rows of little reddish translucent things like sticky pearls along their length. In the steaming brown broth, along with dark green fronds that looked like tiny ferns and whitish chunks of something that could be anything, Roxanne saw pink multilegged things with bodies about the size of the chocolate sprinkles her mother used to put on cookies. It smelled really good in an Asian shrimp dish sort of way, but the sight of those little critters stopped her cold.

"They're newly hatched crustaceans," said Tsveö.

"I used to love them when I was a kid," said Minion, looking up from his meal of sticky reddish pearl-like things. "Wait, the ones I had were on Lup. They'd be extinct now. These must be a different species."

"Actually," said Naüÿng, "they are the Lup species. The NGanyäö [Squish]lek was a luxury liner and they had a tank of live ones aboard for the passengers."

"So this is the food of our homeworld," murmured Megamind, who had a bowl of the same soup in front of him. "I might have been weaned on these. How poignant." He was not in a good mood. The doctor had forbidden him sweets until further notice, with a warning that the notice would not be given for at least a month. He was also thinking back to the crowd in the hallway. Gratifying though it had been, he was unhappily aware of the large percentage of his own people that he'd had to look up at, including Tsveö, who was sixteen years old. When Anyöp Lei had mentioned the markers for inlander's malnutrition, that was the most obvious one. Megamind was the shortest man on Harolup. The doctor had assured him that it was not quite too late, that after a year or so on the diet, he might grow a little, and he was eager for that, but at the same time another part of his brain was plotting to get into the stash of treats that they'd brought on the Adventure, perhaps by arranging to visit the biology lab and sneaking off at an opportune moment. Minion was also small for his age, only a little bigger than Naüÿng, who was seventeen, but he was taking it in stride, and he'd never had his boss' sweet tooth.

Then Megamind picked up the bowl, as he'd seen Tsveö do, took a sip and his expression completely changed. His body responded to the soup as it had never responded to any Earth food. This was what he was meant to eat, and suddenly he couldn't get enough of it. He poured the entire bowlful down. "[I'm home!] he said, ignoring the slightly shocked expression on Tsveö's face. "Roxanne, I'm home. [Menang, do you feel it? We're home!]"

"[I sure do, sir,]" replied Minion. "[Isn't it great?]"

  
  



	12. Chapter 12

One of the more amusing oddities of life aboard Harolup High Orbit (at least from Roxanne's point of view) was that ten-year-old broadcasts of KMCP News were a popular entertainment. Because the habitat kept to the arbitrary "day" and "night" that had been standard in Me Weä [Squish]iyey space, which was totally out of sync with Earth time, the evening news arrived in the morning and the morning news in the evening. After spending most of the afternoon studying the history, customs and social structure of Harolup society, followed by a dinner that involved not a single land species, watching Earth TV sounded like a pleasant evening activity. Most of the Tseri[gulp]uu viewers watched it on thirty-second delay with computer-translated subtitles, but she, Megamind and Minion joined the English language subgroup of the Earth Study Group for the raw live version. ("Raw" was the state of the group as well as the broadcast: it was a leisure activity, so everyone was naked.) The room it was shown in was below and to one side of the big pool room and had one glass wall that looked into the pool, so that the Opuulu members of the audience could watch without their suits. About half the people in the room were Tsveö's and Naüÿng's immediate family: their four parents, ten-year-old sisters and four-year-old brothers. (The introductions were an occasion for Roxanne to learn the Tseri[gulp]uu naming system: sons got their family names from their fathers, daughters from their mothers.) There were also a pregnant Yi[gulp]vi, her Opuulu and the Opuulu's six-month-old daughter, a little creature that could have fit comfortably in a twelve-ounce coffee mug. Roxanne found the littlest three, the Yi[gulp]vi already speaking with an adult-sounding vocabulary even though he had a typical preschooler's lisp, the Opuulu all big eyes and sharp teeth, the cutest things she'd ever seen. The show was projected on the wall opposite the pool. The Yi[gulp]vi and Roxanne sat with their backs against the clear glasslike wall, with the Opuulu floating high enough to see over their heads.

When the opening sequence first came on, Roxanne felt a rush of warmth for her former employer like she hadn't felt since she was newly hired, while at the same time feeling a certain freedom in the knowledge that she'd never have to meet that particular deadline again. She got her notebook and pencil out to write down people's reactions, hoping to learn more of the subtleties of Tseri[gulp]uu psychology, but it was they who ended up learning something about human psychology from her reaction to the first story.

"At the top of the news, we have a new development in the latest kidnapping of Roxanne Ritchi, this time into space, by Megamind in the early hours of yesterday morning. As we reported yesterday, Metro Man was on the job, leaving the following voice mail message for the mayor even as he went forth into battle." The face of the anchorman, Jack Grey, was replaced by a view of the lake at night, as seen from one of the piers. The water rippled as the illusory nosecone broke the surface. The lake appeared to churn, glowing from below as the hologram projector simulated the fire of an underwater launch. "Mayor, this is Metro Man." The long cigar shape seemed to rise from the water; as its tail fins cleared, the whole surface was briefly illuminated by what what Roxanne knew was the thermite on the barge going off. "Megamind is aboard that rocket and it looks like he's got Roxie. I've only got a few minutes to catch up with it and bring her back safely."

She stood up suddenly. "That liar!" she shouted, flinging her notebook at the wall.

As though she'd hit a hidden button, the image of Jack Grey returned. "KMCP's research team has just received GPS data from the hero's cell phone service provider, showing that Metro Man was already in orbit when he made that phone call, waiting to intercept the villain and foil his plan. But what's disturbing here is the record from after the phone call. There's another thirteen minutes when the signal appears to stand still and then it moves out of Earth orbit on a trajectory that looks like it's headed, not for the Moon or any planet, but out of the plane of the ecliptic, the flat area of space around the sun that contains the orbits of all the planets and most of the asteroids." An artist's rendition appeared, showing an area of space with the Earth's surface at the bottom, the Sun in the background, and a trail of bright spots curving out of orbit toward the upper right corner of the screen. "This is all we have before the signal goes out of range." There was another rendition, this time with the Earth as background. "It may indicate a planned rendezvous with a comet, a deliberately deceptive maneuver on Megamind's part or the unplanned result of a struggle for the controls." A third view appeared, with the Sun on the far right edge of the screen. "Whichever it is, the fact that there has been no communication from either Megamind or Metro Man in the twenty-nine hours since that phone call is very worrying."

"[He's endangered us all,]" said a child's voice to her right. Grey continued, asking the city's astronomers, amateur and professional, to train their telescopes on that region of the sky, but Tsveö's mother talked over it.

"[Wrist unit, contact the Commander.]"

###

Wayne wasn't ready. He had spend most of his six hours reading as much about the Glau as he could take in, along with what little was known about the Star Eater people. Only in the last forty minutes had he remembered to do some research into his present situation. He learned that, while normal Tseri#uu government was a confusing system based on something the translation software called "optimal decision theory," Harolup High Orbit was, like Earth ships at sea and in space, a dictatorship, although it was customary for the Commander to consult widely before major non-emergency decisions. Then he started reading his case file. It started with the report of a doctor who had examined him while he was unconscious. It reported that he suffered from, not just suppression of reproductive function and premature aging due to overuse of superspeed, both of which he'd already figured out, but also deficiencies of a couple of chemicals with long names. He'd never before been examined by a doctor who had experience with Glau patients. He hoped he would get to talk to this doctor at some point. Next came a report by Ilu Menang, captain of the Adventure. Minion, in other words. He expected it to start with the discovery of the oxygen problem, but he found that it started at the Li'l Gifted School. In Wayne's memory, Megamind (or Johnny Smith, as he was called then) was a troubled individual from the beginning, one whom Wayne cared about and thought of in a friendly way even though he had to take action to keep the blue guy in line every so often. From Minion's point of view, Wayne had been a bully that the teacher had allowed to run wild. Had he really given Johnny a concussion in dodge ball? He supposed he could check the school records - no, wait, there were no Earth records to check. It was Minion's word against his, and among Minion's people, Minion's word could be expected to count for more.

He went into superspeed to read the rest. Minion had a good memory, and was honest enough to point out that the rough treatment Wayne had handed out as Metro Boy had disappeared as the years went by, as he had gained enough experience to apprehend without injury. There were even a couple of incidents in there in which he had rescued Megamind from his own malfunctioning inventions. The fish also mentioned the opportunities for Minion to escape that Wayne always provided, including one occasion when Wayne had secretly interfered with the efforts of the police. The account concluded with this note: "On Earth, people who don't have a humanoid body shape or human DNA are legally animals, no matter how intelligent they are. If I had been apprehended even once, I would have been confiscated and sold at auction if I was lucky, executed without trial if I wasn't. I owe Wayne Scott my life and my freedom many times over. Please take that into account."

Wayne was touched. He'd half expected Minion to hang him out to dry, but the fish (Opuulu, he reminded himself) had been scrupulous in his testimony. He looked for Megamind's report, but didn't find one. There was one on the costs his presence imposed on the habitat, from the rebuilding of Minion's spare suits, which he had crushed to make room for himself in the cargo hold, to his basic physical needs to the estimated time spent by various people dealing with him. All the numbers were expressed both as simple amounts and as a percentage of the total resources of the habitat, which drove home the point that he was in a limited environment where every individual imposed a significant burden. He was almost done with that one when the page of text disappeared, replaced by a video image of two Opuulu, one about twice the size of the other.

The big one immediately began to chew him out in Tseri#uu while the little one floated silently with an anxious expression. Getting chewed out by someone with fangs was impressive, even though Wayne didn't understand a word. The bigger fish's feelings were clear enough; he (she?) was furious. When the tirade was finished, the smaller one spoke in English. "What the Commander is upset about is this." _The Commander, as in the guy whose got my life in his hands? Oh, shit_. The two faces were replaced by about the last thing in the world he expected: the KMCP Channel 8 News logo. "It arrived only a few minutes ago." Wayne watched the report. His cell phone? He had turned it off after the call to the Mayor, but the GPS tracking feature, which he'd gotten so that news crews could follow him more easily in the heat of battle, never shut off unless the battery died. He could have thrown it out to fall into the atmosphere and burn up, but between the excitement of going and the worry about getting caught, he hadn't thought about it. And why was it such a big deal? It wasn't as if anyone on Earth had the technology to follow them. Then, about the time the news report ended and the two fish came back, the penny dropped.

"I might as well have left a sign out for the Star Eater people saying 'We went that-a-way.'"

The smaller Opuulu translated for the Commander, then remarked in English, "People of all intelligent species get attached to things they always have with them, so I suppose it isn't strange that you kept it, but why didn't you turn off the tracking? You know it wouldn't have been any use to you once you left Earth."

'I don't know how." The smaller Opuulu (whom he was tempted to dub Babel Fish) gaped at him with astonishment tinged with amusement. He (she?) turned to the Commander and translated again. The bigger Opuulu roared with laughter. In the background, Wayne could hear other laughter. Sound doesn't carry in vacuum, but the pole that connected him to the rest of the habitat must have had some capability to conduct sound, not enough for normal hearing to detect, but enough to get Wayne's attention. He looked across empty space into the habitat and saw at least a dozen holograms of himself with blue people and fish looking at them and laughing as if he'd just told the best joke ever.

The screen went blank. Wayne curled up in a semi-fetal position, holding his head. He didn't often get headaches, but it felt like the one coming on right then was going to be a doozy.

###

"Wow. Sir, I think we just learned all the cuss words."

"No, you didn't," replied the four-year-old Opuulu. "He didn't say eÿ[click]ong."

"Manners, Æünik," said his mother. The hologram of Wayne disappeared, replaced by one of Sa[squish]ikwuë Nawa.

"Ilu Amnang and Roxanne Ritchi," said the Commander. "[While I understand your wanting to take more time to get adjusted, I want to settle the fate of Wayne Scott before my temper gets the better of me. So I want each of you to dictate a report, like the one Menang has already given, as soon as possible. He can explain the form and the rules. Do you understand?]" He didn't ask if they would do it. It was clearly an order.

While the Tseri[gulp]uu didn't have any use for privacy, they were generous with peace and quiet. Not only was each room soundproofed, each bedroom (hammock room?) could be divided into smaller compartments, and the dividers were also soundproofed. Megamind and Roxanne each sat in their own, dictating their reports to their wrist units (and thereby the whole population of Harolup), hearing not a sound from the other. By unspoken agreement, she was covering Wayne's background, his family and its longtime role in the city, his private school education and the public acts of heroism that first established his reputation when Roxanne was in middle school. Only then did she start on her personal experience of him, starting from her first work covering his battles and rescues, then the early interviews, then the day he asked her to accompany him to a charity dinner. She was the first woman who was not his mother that he'd ever been seen with at a public social function. He was direct about the reason.

"Most women I meet get that look in their eye when they first meet me, that fortune hunter look, even some of the ones who were born to money themselves. You don't have it, and that means I won't have to spend the whole evening worrying about what I'm getting into with you." It was her first glimpse of the real Wayne, so she put it in the report as the beginning of the friendship that eventually developed between them. Back on Earth, Roxanne had occasionally been approached by some sleazeball literary agent who wanted her to write a tell-all book about Wayne. She had always refused. But now she realized that she was writing it after all, not for money but as a kind of character reference, to show, not just the Commander, but all the Tseri[gulp]uu who he was and why they should accept him and give him a chance to redeem himself.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the barrier, Megamind was struggling. Part of him wanted to use this report as an excuse to boast, to shade the truth, to play up the glory of his own career and the contemptible spoilsport side of his longtime rival. The other part sensed that that sort of thing wasn't done here and that he'd be better off sticking to the truth. The fact that expressions like "Goody Two-Shoes" didn't translate very well into Tseri[gulp]uu was only making it worse. He had been gradually realizing that, while the part of him that was Ilu Amnang was home at last and very glad of it, the part that was the Master of All Villainy might not fit in very well here, and the realization had made him uncharacteristically quiet all afternoon. Now he wanted to consult Minion. Actually, he wanted to whine to Minion about how hard it was, and get some sympathy and encouragement and coaxing and maybe a snack. But the rules had been made very clear to him. He was to discuss this with no one until he had finished, and the snack he had in mind, coffee with two creams and five sugars and a half-dozen assorted donuts, would definitely be forbidden by his doctor. He held his head in his hands, miserable for a moment, and then it occurred to him that his head wasn't enormous anymore. It was a perfectly normal, bald, blue head, and no one would ever make fun of it again. It was Wayne who was funny-looking now. That thought made him smile, and that smile gave him the focus to get started. "[My first encounter with the person I was to know as Wayne Scott happened as we were entering the asteroid belt on our approach to Earth...]"

  
  



	13. Chapter 13

Wayne was only allowed to nurse his headache for a few minutes before the screen came on again. The Commander and Babel Fish were back.

"Wayne Scott, called Metro Man, it is time for you to answer the Commander's questions. Who are you? Why did you come here? And why did you do it in the deceptive and dangerous way that you did?"

"Who I am... is what I came here to learn." The smaller fish translated simultaneously. "On Earth I, well, I'd been told by my mother, my human mother, about landing in their house when I was a baby, in a very small space ship, but they had no way of knowing where I had come from or who had sent me or why. Now I do know that, a little of it, and I'm grateful. So that's two questions. As far as why I stowed away instead of asking Megamind to take me along, well..." He groped for a phrasing that would put things in the best possible light while not making it sound like he was badmouthing Megamind. Megamind was one of them and he was not. "I wanted a chance to show that I could make a contribution." He tried for the appropriate sincere and pleading facial expression.

The Commander didn't speak. Babel Fish seemed to know what he wanted to ask next. "A contribution to our colonization effort?"

"Yes. Enough for you to feel that I was worthy of the help you gave me."

"And you didn't expect your longtime rivals to be willing to give you that chance."

"No."

"That explains the deception. What about the risk?"

"That was unforgivable." It was something that had been drummed into him in prep school. If you fail in a way that's not deniable, don't bother trying to deny it. You'll just make things worse for yourself. "I'm not asking for forgiveness. Just a chance to atone."

"You didn't answer the question."

Wayne looked "down", considering adjectives, throwing them away. It seemed that they didn't want the display of remorse that an authority figure back home would expect. They literally wanted to know the reasons behind his decision. And simple ignorance wouldn't cut it. He hadn't exactly known what the risks were, but he had known that he didn't know, and had acted anyway. It had seemed to him to be worth the risk.

Then it came to him. "I figured this was my only chance. I saw the plans for that ship. I had no hope of understanding them, much less building a ship of my own. It was either take this chance or be left on Earth for the rest of my life, looking up at the stars and longing for answers I was never going to get."

Babel Fish translated, then discussed things with the Commander for a moment. Wayne took a moment to look down at the habitat, not to see how many people were watching him (although he noticed that the answer was, plenty) but searching for the real individuals speaking into the camera that was feeding this screen. When he did, he was surprised at their sizes. He'd guessed that the Commander was bigger than Minion, Babel Fish smaller, but in fact they were both bigger. The Commander was enormous. A gorilla body for him would have to be twenty feet tall just to have a big enough tank.

"Now," the smaller Opuulu continued. "What kind of contribution do you consider yourself capable of making?" Although he had never been through a job interview, he recognized this question as the beginning of the chance he'd asked for. It meant they hadn't dismissed him at first sight.

"You receive KMCP News. How familiar are you with Metro City television news coverage of my career?"

"Quite familiar. Video programs from Metro City are the only broadcast entertainment from Earth that shows us persons from our Home Star Group, so they are the most popular. We have seen the coverage of your battles, your interviews and the events honoring you, as well as the reports of your activities in the League of Heroes and the biography that Super Action Round-Up does every five years." So the four of them who'd come on the Adventure were all celebrities here, too. Wayne wondered whether the people of Harolup had been rooting for the villains all these years.

"Then I won't waste your time describing that part of my experience."

"It won't be a waste if what you tell us is your experience, as opposed to what got into the broadcasts."

Wayne smiled at that. Just because these people had never been to Earth, that didn't mean they were unsophisticated. "Okay. My work as a hero usually started with a phone call from the mayor, police chief, fire chief or some other authority, although it could also be a cry for help from an ordinary citizen or a situation I spotted myself while flying around the city. Most crimes by humans can be handled by the human authorities, although I did intervene in one of those from time to time, just to keep the criminal element aware that I might show up at any time." He stopped himself, realizing that he was recapping what he'd said in a dozen interviews over the years. They wanted what didn't get in the broadcasts? Okay, then. "Or sometimes Roxie would discover something. She was an old-fashioned investigative reporter, bright and persistent and absolutely fearless. Not all my rescues of her were the result of some villain setting out to kidnap her. Sometimes she got caught while she was snooping around. She also used to call on me when there was criminal plotting going on and she knew about it but couldn't plant a microphone or sneak in. I would use my X-ray vision and super-hearing, give her my notes afterward, and she'd break the story. She was always careful to leave my name out of it, and to imply that one of the plotters had betrayed the others. This made it easier for the police to convince one of them to really betray the others. Naturally, if my involvement in this kind of investigating were known, it would lose half its effectiveness as a means of inducing criminal conspirators to turn state's evidence, so it was kept from the public. Another thing that didn't get reported was the effort I made to keep major battles available to the cameras. That's what the GPS tracking feature on the phone was for: if things moved fast, they wouldn't have any problem figuring out where the action was. This was one area where I didn't favor KMCP over the other stations. Every reporter and camera crew working in Metro City had access to that signal, so none of them had anything to gain by talking about it. I would also do what I could to keep the battles in areas of low population, not that it was hard. Most supervillains love media attention and the areas with low population tend to be the ones with good sight lines for filming. Is this the kind of thing you're looking for?"

"Please continue."

So he did. He intended to keep things positive, but any behind-the-scenes look was going to include government officials who blocked investigations, editors who killed stories and people who attempted to mislead him in order to get him to do some kind of dirty work for them. He even threw in one or two incidents, early in his career, when the misleading had succeeded, and he made a point of crediting Roxie for the fact that it had stopped happening. Her crap-detector was as valuable as any super-sense of his, and he had come to rely on it. It ended up being the story of how the two of them, with the support of Roxanne's editor and some smart people in the police forensics lab, had swept out the network of city officials, shipping company foremen and bankers who were in bed with the local mob. They had followed one thread of that network into the Scott Foundation, where it ended in the office of a man his parents had trusted for decades. This led to his taking over the management of the foundation himself, and talking about it let him segue into his work as a manager. He finished up with music and the way he found himself able to change the atmosphere in a room just by picking up a guitar and leading a sing-along. He didn't have to be very good. Better if he wasn't, in fact, and he'd found that subtly squeezing the neck so that the instrument went out of tune, and then struggling with it on stage, was more effective for generating warm feelings than any well-played song.

"And what are your goals now, beyond the atonement you spoke of earlier?"

"I want to find my people, to meet them face to face, and I want to find the Star Eater people before they find us."

"That last is a goal we share, although it is questionable whether we will have the resources to act on it in our lifetime. We will take what you have said into consideration. You may continue your research." The screen went blank.

###

The hammock was similar to the one Roxanne had brought home from a college Spring Break trip to the Yucatan and used every summer since, a vast, fine net of strings without stretchers. Megamind had never been in one before.

"It's harder to get into than a regular hammock, but it's a lot more comfortable once you're in," she explained. Then she helped him get into it. She stood next to it where it hung the diagonal length of the little room so that it rested against the backs of her thighs, had him stand in front of her with his back to her, so close they were almost touching, then spread the strings with one hand and sank down while pulling him toward her with the other so that he ended up sitting in her lap. "Now lift your legs and swing them left," she said, doing the same herself while moving her upper body to the right and pulling his along. She caught the edge of the hammock with her other hand and her toes and spread it so that the net held their whole bodies. "There." She lay back, pulling him along, then released him. "What do you think?"

"Hmm." He squirmed a little on top of her. "If it is guaranteed to include you, then I would say it couldn't be anything other than perfectly comfortable, but I think I should get a more representative sample." He moved until he was beside her except for one of her arms under his neck. The tension of the hammock prevented them from lying completely separately, not that they wanted to. He shifted around a little more, adjusting his weight on the strings. "Yes, I think I shall get a very good night's sleep in this." He kissed her shoulder.

"Do you think our audience is going to be disappointed that we're not making love?" she asked.

"It really bothers you, the idea of being watched."

"Yeah. Doesn't it bother you?"

"Remember, in prison there wasn't any privacy, either. My earliest sexual education was watching couples going at it in the showers and the exercise yard. My uncles would try to keep me away, but I was an elusive little boy and I was determined to see, specifically because I wasn't allowed to. By the time I was ten or so, I was bored with it."

"And people didn't gawk?"

"New men made the mistake of gawking sometimes. Generally not more than once."

"So there was an etiquette about it."

"I wouldn't have used that word but, yes. Staring was rude, and rudeness could get you punched in the face."

"[Wrist unit,]" she said. "[What are the informal rules about observing sexual activity here?]"

Words appeared in the air above them. "[Questions about informal rules require consultation. Please wait.]" The couple looked at each other for a long moment, puzzled. Then the hologram of an elderly Yi[gulp]vi woman, as naked as they were, appeared on their ceiling, reclining in a shallow white-floored pool of water.

"[Hello, Amnang. Hello, Roxanne. I am U[click]hani Vöhryeh. I"ve been appointed cultural consultant for you visitors from Earth. You asked about informal rules about observing sexual activity?]"

They nodded.

"[Well, first of all, sexual activity isn't a unique category of activity here. The rules are the same as if you were watching someone build something or play a game. And the first rule is to remember that, no matter how much the hologram shows you, you are not there and therefore you can't possibly know as much about what's going on as someone who is. Therefore you must not offer any opinions or corrections or any other sort of comment, either at the time or afterward, unless the person you observed asks for them. There are two exceptions to this rule. One is if you see something physically dangerous happening. The persons there may have divided attention and be unaware, so you may break in. The other is that compliments are always welcome so long as you don't override the interruption block to give them.]"

"[So some total stranger could come up to me in the hallway tomorrow and say "Hey, Earth girl, you were really hot last night!]"

"[Certainly. It's considered the best sort of compliment to be told that something you did inspired someone else to do something, and that includes having orgasms.]"

"[Okay,]" said Roxanne while thinking, _I have got to take another look at Professor Slausson's notes about coping with culture shock._ "[Any other rules we should know about?]"

"[You may ask questions if the persons you are observing have not set an interruption block, just as you would if you wanted to say something that was irrelevant to what they were doing.]"

"[We'd both like one of those interruption blocks,]" said Megamind.

"[You've been the talk of Harolup every since your message arrived. If you haven't felt deluged with questions and comments all day, then I think you can assume you have them, although your wrist units can confirm that. You may also find out from your wrist units who is watching you, either generally or specifically, at the time or later, and you may ask for comments from anyone who is watching you or has watched you, although they are not obligated to give them. You may also invite particular people to watch. They are free to refuse, but if they say they will, then they must watch unless they have a very good excuse.]"

"[What about asking some particular person not to watch you?]" The particular person Roxanne had in mind was Wayne. It was one thing to be watched by people who had not been raised with a voyeurism taboo and would watch innocently. It was another to be watched by someone who'd been raised with the same rules she had.

U[click]hani Vöhryeh frowned. "[Oh. Oh, dear. That's considered very serious. I hope you and this hypothetical other person will have sought mediation counseling before it comes to that.]"

"[One more thing,]" Megamind added. "[I ask this because I've run into it more than once on Earth. If two people are talking and one has watched and the other hasn't and the one who has takes advantage of the other's ignorance to misrepresent what he or she saw, how serious is that?]"

"[That would depend on what choices were made based on that misinformation, but it would always be very serious.]"

"[So is that all the rules?]" asked Roxanne.

"[Those are the rules as they apply to sexual activity.]"

"[Thank you, U[click]hani Vöhryeh.]" "

[You're welcome, and have fun.]" She gave them a knowing smile and vanished.

"Hoping to avoid being watched by a person who has X-ray vision?" Megamind asked.

"How did you know?"

"He's the only person aboard that you know well enough to want to particularly exclude, aside from Minion, and he'd be too embarrassed to watch."

"And you're right in that it's silly of me to worry about him seeing us. He learned to restrain himself from peeping a long time ago. He's probably the only awake, off-duty person on this space station who's not watching us."

"[Wrist unit, how many people are watching us?]"

"[Two,]" said the system.

"What?" Roxanne was perversely disappointed. "Have most people lost interest already?"

"Maybe something else is happening. [Wrist unit, of everything being watched right now, what is being watched by the largest number of people, and what percentage of the number watching anything is that?]"

"[Ninety-six percent of those watching anything are watching the current conversation between Wayne Scott and Sa[squish]ikwuë Nawa, translated by Ivri[click] Nemya.]"

Megamind grinned. "It seems that watching us in bed holds less interest that watching the Commander rip Wayne a new one. I think we should take advantage of this opportunity."

"What do you mean?"

"We've got only two people watching us, and they're probably safety staff who are watching every sleeping person aboard. It's the closest thing to privacy we're going to get aboard this sardine can." He put an arm around her, along the bottom edges of her breasts, and smiled eagerly.

He could tell by the look on her face that she was still wavering, so he decided to use his next tactic, which was to pretend he'd already been rejected. He knew she thought he was cute when he sulked. "Oh, fine," he said. pouting and rolling over so his back was to her. "Here I am in a type of bedding that forces me into close skin contact with the most beautiful woman in two worlds and I've got to be celibate."

She giggled, and he knew he'd convinced her. "[Wrist unit,]" she said. "[Turn down the lights in here, as close to total darkness as you can.]" The room dimmed. As close as it could turned out to be very close; only three tiny red lights glowed, leaving the rest of the room, and Minion's empty suit in the corner, almost invisible. She embraced him from behind. "If we can't keep 'em from watching, at least we can make 'em squint."


	14. Chapter 14

Morning in Harolup High Orbit began with frolic. Officially it was an exercise period, but in practice it consisted of retracting the tables and opening the pool to whatever loud, wet, energetic activity people wanted to engage in. Megamind and Roxanne were fitted with helmets that consisted of breathing masks attached to rigid crests going up from the back of the neck up to the top of the head. They looked like fins but were actually air processors that took in oxygen from the water and released carbon dioxide. In one of those, a humanoid air breather could stay under water for a little over four days before the filter needed changing. With the addition of fins on their feet, Roxanne and Megamind entered into Minion's world and had a great time there.

Breakfast was all about networking. Much more than during the previous two meals, people moved from table to table, discussing arrangements for the day's activities. The Yi[gulp]velit as well as the Opuulu swam if they had any distance to cover. Megamind, Minion and Roxanne were at the table with Tsveö and Naüÿng, just finishing up, when an elderly blue woman swam up and joined them. Her name was Ni[click] Aüvrek and, as soon as introductions were over, she had a question.

"[What were your fathers' names?]"

"[[Gulp]anen and Vrouw,]" replied Minion.

"[Knew it! My Viöreh and I served with them in the Vacuum Skirmishers. Two campaigns.]" Then she rattled off two strings of gibberish which were, Tsveö explained, the names of two asteroids that the Vacuum Skirmishers, an interstellar fighter unit in the Tseri[gulp]uu military, had fought for in Me Weä [Squish]iyey. Roxanne had read a little about the Asteroid War, in which the various peoples fought over mineral-rich asteroids in uninhabited star systems while continuing to get along peaceably in most other ways. She also knew that Megamind's and Minion's male parents (Megamind's father and Minion's cloneparent) had served in those wars in their youth, but she still tended to think of it as so far in the past that no one remembered it. To have someone turn up who not only remembered the war but had fought in it was discombobulating in a way that surprised her. (She was to realize later that she still had a notion in the back of her mind that advanced civilizations don't make war.)

"[Our fathers weren't home very often when we were little, so we really want to hear what you remember about them,]" said Minion.

"[That's why I came over. When do you have time?]"

###

After breakfast, Megamind and Roxanne watched Wayne's testimony together and recorded their reactions to it separately. (They withheld their private reactions: Megamind's disappointment that Metro Man mentioned him and Minion so seldom, Roxanne's happiness that someone, somewhere was finally getting to hear about all those things she'd agreed to keep quiet as her part of various deals to get someone to testify or to retire quietly.) Then they ate lunch and then Megamind and Minion had a conference call about setting up a brainbot body factory. Roxanne went back to sickbay and allowed Anyöp Lei to do that more thorough exam he had requested. It was very thorough and took the whole afternoon. Tsveö was there to translate and she congratulated herself that she was adapting enough that she was okay with having a sixteen-year-old boy in the room even during the gynecological and proctological parts of the exam.

Then a much younger child walked in, maybe nine or ten, looking excited, holding a little circle of bright metal in one hand and a very small maroon plastic shape, like a Bing cherry-sized ball of play-dough that an adult had squished with a thumb, in the other. The collar of the child's shirt was vee-necked instead of round-necked, so this was a girl.

"[Ah, there you are, Ni[squish]n,]" said the doctor. "[This is my Yi[gulp]vi's granddaughter. She invented this for you. Hold it up close so Roxanne Ritchi can get a good look at it.]" The examining table held Roxanne in a reclining position, her upper body at a slant and her feet up level with her shoulders on supports much more comfortable than the steel ones on a gynecologist's examining table on Earth; the medical fish stood at the end of the table, almost between her feet. Now it lowered itself so that her face was level with the girl's. Her position, sprawled open like a turkey ready for stuffing, didn't bother the child a bit. She vibrated with excitement, like a puppy who wants to make friends. The ring was the outer edge of a clear, flat disc, the rest of which was almost invisible, like the skin of a soap bubble. "[I call it the] super-tampon," said Ni[squish]n. She handed Roxanne the maroon thing, then took the water-dispensing hose from the side of the examining table, held the ring flat and began to drip water onto it. "[You put it on your cervix.]" The clear portion bulged downward, containing the water, until it held maybe a quarter-cup. "[It catches whatever comes out of your uterus.]" The little maroon thing played three humming musical notes and vibrated. "[That means it's full.]" She put the hose back. "[Then when you sit on the toilet, you press it and it releases.]" She glanced at the maroon thing. Realizing that it was a remote, Roxanne pressed the indentation. The bottom of the bulge became longer and narrower until it was funnel-shaped. The water ran out of the tip onto the drain in the floor.

"Wow," said Roxanne, and then remembered to speak in Tseri[gulp]uu. "[This really is an advanced civilization.]"

The girl beamed. The membrane of the super-tampon shrank as it emptied until it was once again flat inside the ring. A droplet of water hung from underneath it, apparently left behind when the hole closed. She shook it off and handed it to Roxanne. The table began to rise under her.

"[Now, Roxanne Ritchi, I'd like you to put it on immediately,]" said the doctor. "[We'll check to make sure it's correctly placed and you can take it with you."] She held it in the fingers of one hand for a moment, working out the logistics, while young Ni[squish]n climbed up the mechanical suit and clung to its back, looking over the metal shoulder with unchanged eagerness. The table stopped where it had been when the child came in, the top about level with the suit's elbows. Tsveö did not join them. Instead, he moved away from them, up along the side of the table, and put his hand on Roxanne's shoulder with a look of concern on his young blue face.

"Is this hard for you?" he asked in English.

Delighted that someone in this strange culture understood what she was going through, she gave him a warm smile. "I'll be all right," she said. "Thanks for asking." Fortified by his sympathy, she leaned forward just enough to slip the little thing inside herself while two pairs of alien eyes watched with undivided attention. _Good thing I'm stretched out more than I used to be. This would be a lot harder if I could only get two fingers in._ The device went into place pretty easily. Anyöp Lei handed her the electronic speculum, which was a small dildo-like shape with a handle at one end and an array of tiny lights and cameras at the other. She'd already used it once. As soon as she touched it to her opening, a hologram appeared to her left showing her vaginal tissues, eight times life size. She pushed it in until the hologram showed a good view of her cervix with the super-tampon on it, the ring a shiny line that fit perfectly around it.

"[Perfect,]" said Ni[squish]n.

"[Looks like it's in its correct place.]" said the doctor. "[Why don't you leave it in until tomorrow morning? Then take it out, clean it and let us know how it suits you.]"

###

"That kid did not invent that membrane," said Minion. At dinner, Roxanne had asked Megamind and Minion to explain how the super-tampon worked in English so she'd be sure of understanding it. Megamind had asked Tsveö and Naüÿng how to translate certain concepts in Tseri[gulp]uu science and the three had been in intense discussion ever since. Meanwhile, Minion was explaining it in terms of his own experience. "Before the boss built my first suit, I lived in a globe of that same membrane, ever since we left Lup. It takes in oxygen from the air, puts out carbon dioxide and it responds to certain frequencies of radio signals, so I could roll the globe in any direction. I could also open it to take something in or get rid of something. In a pinch, I could break it open completely and at the same time use my swim bladder and my tail to get some lift and kind of launch myself through the air for a few feet. Even if I didn't get close enough to bite the guy the boss was fighting, which was the only reason I ever did that, it generally distracted the guy enough so the boss could get in the winning punch or kick or whatever. Then he'd put the membrane and me in water and I could signal the membrane to wrap itself around me in its globe shape, seal itself up and I'd be back to normal. What that new device of yours does is pretty simple by comparison. The big accomplishment is the ring. It's gotta fit so perfectly that it doesn't bother you and it never comes off by accident, and the only way to -"

"I'm sorry, Roxanne," her husband broke in, "but there's no way to explain this in terms of the human understanding of physics and chemistry. You'll have to learn the Tseri[gulp]uu version, and that's not something that can be accomplished over dinner."

"Then we should start soon," she replied. "I mean, this is something everyone knows here, right? It's as basic as the language."

"It's deeply part of our language," said Naüÿng. "There are common metaphors you'll never really understand until -" He broke off. "Looks like we've got company."

A large brown and green shape, approaching them underwater, broke the surface as it came up to the table, revealing itself to be Sa[squish]ikwuë Nawa. Roxanne hadn't seen the Commander in person before; she hadn't realized how big he was. Next to him, Minion and Naüÿng looked about the size of that six-month-old they had met the previous evening. "[Greetings, everyone, and especially Roxanne Ritchi, whom I am pleased to meet for the first time.]" He paused to let everyone reply, then continued. "[I believe we have come to an optimal decision. Wrist unit, display my most recent map.]"

###

If Wayne Scott had been aware of the conversation that followed and had known, not just that he was allowed to watch it, but also that he would be provided with captions in English if he asked for them, he might have learned of his fate right then and there, but he didn't. He spent the time looking at the map on which the Commander's was based, the map of current Tseri[gulp]uu use of Harolup's resources. He had offered to contribute to the colonization effort, so he figured he'd better know something about it. He did discover that the screen would give him a close look at whatever map feature he asked for and was doing some serious virtual exploring when the two all-too-familiar piscene faces came on.

"Wayne Scott, your sentence has been determined. Since you have asked for knowledge of your people, you shall do the work your ancestors did: mining. The three thousand one hundred twenty-four cyborg cores that came with you on the Adventure are going to need bodies. You will assemble, first, the materials needed to build a factory to build those bodies, then the materials out of which the bodies will be built. After that, you will be trained to work in space and you will build a small starship of the sort that can keep a single person alive for the journey to Imbarnan and back, starting from mining asteroids for the materials. If you manage to avoid killing yourself through carelessness, you will be trained to pilot it and allowed to go to Imbarnan. We estimate that the completion of this sentence will take about five years." Wayne wanted to thank it, but it kept talking. "Tomorrow morning a shuttle will depart for First Seed. You will be provided with respiration gear and will follow it down. You will not be allowed to enter either the shuttle or Harolup High Orbit. On the surface, you will rendezvous with your translator and be introduced to the community. In the meantime, it is recommended that you get a good night's sleep." The two Opuulu vanished before he could respond. Their faces were replaced by a far more familiar one, which he had longed for and at the same time dreaded facing.

"Roxie."

"Hey, Wayne." She was smiling, a sad smile, as if she wished they could be meeting under better circumstances.

"Can you forgive me? And accept my thanks for pulling my chestnuts out of the fire and saving all our lives?"

"Of course." She sighed. "If I'd been able to reach you right after we found out you were on the Adventure, I'd have broken something over your head, but that already seems like a long time ago. This is a small colony and we're going to be seeing a lot of each other, so we'd better get along. Besides," her smile widened, "it's good to see a friendly face from home. Listen, I want to introduce you to someone." She turned to her right and the camera panned out and left to show an Opuulu in a plain metal suit. "This is Ivri[click] Naüÿng. Ivri[click] is the family name and Naüÿng is his personal name. He's coming down on the shuttle with us and he's going to be your translator."

"Um, hi." Naüÿng was clearly nervous.

"Hey, Nayung. Can I call you Nayung? Call me Wayne."

"Hi, Wayne. Yeah, sure, Nayung is close enough."

"Great. I look forward to working with you." He wasn't sure he did. His previous experiences with Opuulu had led him to prefer an Yi#vi over an Opuulu translator, but that wasn't this guy's fault, and he wasn't in any position to be choosy. "Roxie, did you say we? You're coming to the surface, too?"

"Yeah. We've all got our job assignments. Megamind and Minion are officially the brainbot managers. Brace yourself. They're going to be your bosses. I'm going to be doing field research, observing nature. These people may not have any secrets, but the planet still has plenty."

"Even here you managed to find something to investigate. You know who to call if you get into trouble, right?"

  
  



	15. Chapter 15

Wayne came out of sleep because everything around him was vibrating. He rolled out of his hammock to see a space suit containing a blue stranger riding a platform hung with equipment that came toward him using the pole as a monorail. At the same time, Nayung, suited up, appeared on the screen.

"Hi, Wayne," the Opuulu said through the speaker. "That's Tsekwe Iano. She's gonna fit your respiration gear. Ooh, you shouldn't wear that. It'll just be in the way." The former hero was getting out his cape. He'd been keeping it stuffed into the foot of his hammock because of the way it tended to catch on things without gravity to make it hang properly, but the prospect of company had inspired him to put it on. With Nayung's words, though, he simply rolled it into a compact ball and hung onto it.

The platform parked just outside his habitat. The woman pulled out a toggle from her suit's belt. It turned out to be a conical end to a cord that unwound from a spool built into the belt. She tossed it onto the base that held the habitat onto the pole, where it stuck. Then she picked up a pair of oxygen tanks exactly like SCUBA tanks, with various straps, tubes and controls attached, and leaped straight "up" off the platform. The cord caused her trajectory to curve so that she made a perfect landing inside the airlock. The cord released and was reeled back into her belt. The outer door closed, the airlock filled up, and the inner door opened.

He'd gotten so accustomed to being alone in his tiny space that the presence of another person felt awkward. As she moved into the room, Nayung spoke again.

"Anchor yourself and hold your arms away from your body." He did as instructed, grabbing one of the handholds the place was dotted with. She swung around behind him and anchored herself by wrapping her legs around his waist. It might have been uncomfortably intimate, but between the bulky suit and her impersonal manner, it somehow wasn't. She strapped the tanks to his back. "Hold your head still," said Nayung. "She's gonna put your helmet on." She moved up so she was riding the tanks, holding on with her knees. He heard a grinding sound and felt pressure at the back of his neck. The pattern of the pressure told him what was going on: she was shaving back there. He had a moment of surprise that she knew what special equipment was needed to shave him, then realized that, no, it would be surprising for a human, but these people knew about his kind and knew just what was needed. He felt strangely comforted at that. These were not the Glau, but they knew the Glau, and just because they knew, he felt closer to home. She wiped his neck with something cold, not just where she had shaved but all the way around. Then something like a sheet of transparent plastic seemed to expand from behind the base of his skull, growing like a cobra's hood until it completely surrounded his head and closed around his neck. Iano took another little device and ran it around the edge where the transparent stuff touched his flesh. She pressed some kind of gooey stuff along the seam.

"Move your head around to test the seal," Nayung said. He did as instructed. "Looks good," the fish said. "See you on the ground." As the screen blinked off, Iano floated around in front of him and motioned him toward the airlock. Once he was in, she crowded in after him, turning her back so that it was like being in a very small full elevator. The inner door closed. There was a hiss and Wayne felt every hair on his body stand out under his costume as the air was pumped away and he felt vacuum against his skin. He took a good, deep breath just to reassure himself that he could. Then the outer door opened and he flew out, free in space. He hadn't realized how cramped that little bubble was until he was out of it. And there was no air resistance at all. Holding the bundle of his cape under one arm, he swooped a full orbit around his prison, coming back to the airlock door just as Iano came out of it. She pointed toward Harolup High Orbit. A bay was open and a littler craft, shaped more or less like an Earth jet airplane, was emerging. The shuttle. With a gesture, he offered to carry her. She took his hand and he towed her down to the platform. The bubble was already deflating. He gave her his best heroic smile and flew off after the shuttle.

###

First Seed was now three domes joined together in a vee shape in the center of a cleared area on the edge of a vast lake. As Wayne approached it, he could see a crowd gathered in the open space inside the vee. He'd read that the population here was a little over two hundred and it looked like most of them were out there. Holographically projected shapes in solid, bright colors floated in the air above their heads. He couldn't be sure from this angle, but he thought they looked like text, this world's equivalent of printed banners. Then as he got closer, he began to hear music, Earth music, electric guitars and drums. He recognized it after a moment as a heavy metal song Megamind had used in one of his attacks on the city. When it ended, another one began, from another attack. As the shuttle came in for a landing just ahead of him, he found himself at the correct angle to read the projected words. Only two were in English: "WELCOME ROXANNE".

Until that moment, the former hero hadn't missed Earth a bit. But seeing that there was no welcome banner with his name did something in his gut. On Earth, cheering crowds were for him and on some deep, irrational level, he felt that that was the way it should be. The craft arrived and hovered about ten feet off the ground, extending pontoon landing gear, then lowered itself gradually, in time with the song, so that it touched down as the last notes of "Black Hole Sun" faded out. There was a few seconds' pause and then "Welcome to the Jungle" came on. As the door opened, another hologram was projected directly above it, two or three times life size, showing the door with Megamind emerging from it. The crowd made "reereeree" noises and held up flashing lights. He supposed that was how they cheered here. Wayne told himself that it was only fair, that this was wasn't his homecoming and there was no reason for these people to be welcoming him. Roxanne emerged, holding Megamind's hand, then Minion, then another Yi#vi he didn't know, then Nayung. Wayne landed beside Nayung. The crowd quieted down a little when they saw him, although it wasn't the total silence that would have greeted the sudden appearance of any criminal - and Wayne had to face the fact that he was, to the Tseri#uu, a criminal - at a public event like this on Earth, much less the gasp of horror that would have greeted Megamind. He gave them all his best smile, anyway, with an extra glint for Roxie, who grinned back while Megamind browed him with a quietly victorious little smirk. That lasted about one second. It wasn't in Megamind's character to indulge in tasteful, subdued gloating. The music was still going, He touched Roxanne's arm, their eyes met in wordless understanding, and they began to dance. The volume of ree-ing rose again and then the whole crowd began to dance.

"Hey, Wayne," said Nayung. "Hold still." One of the Opuulu's mechanical hands reached up and peeled off the sealant from around his neck. "You need to leave your respiration gear in the shuttle." Other Tseri#uu were still coming out of the little ship and joining the dance. Tseri#uu dancing, at least when the music was rock-and-roll, had a lot of acrobatics in it, cartwheels and flips and people lifting and being lifted. It meant they had to spread out for quite a distance around the shuttle. The helmet withdrew from around his head. Nayung got the tanks off him.

While he put them inside the shuttle, Wayne looked nervously out at the crowd. The glances he was getting in return seemed nervous, too. Then Roxanne caught his eye and gave a little tilt of her head that seemed invitational. He started to respond, noticed that he was still carrying his cape, unfurled it and put it on. Then he moved out into the crowd, rocking and rolling, showing them his best moves. About the time Axl Rose hit the high note at "knees", he took to the air. He did a few of his most popular aerobatic stunts, played around among the holograms and, by the end of the song, some of the young people were looking a little impressed, although nobody held out any babies for him to juggle. As the song ended, Roxanne caught his eye again. She had that Planning Something look on her face. He descended on the lyrics "It's gonna bring you dowwwnnn," and landed behind her. She looked at Megamind. Wayne could only see the back of her head, but from the way Megamind's eyes went from her face to his and his smile degenerated to a smirk, he knew that he must be the topic of conversation. Minion's eyes moved back and forth between them, with a glance at Wayne. He looked nervous, like he expected drama. Wayne had known her long enough. He knew what she was doing. She was trying to get her blue husband to make peace, while the husband was probably inclined to gloat a little longer. Maybe a lot longer. And Wayne knew what was called for. Eat some crow. It was gonna hurt, but in the long run things would be smoothed out a lot faster. All of Harolup was probably watching. He gritted his teeth and took a step forward. As he held out his hand, a better phrase occurred to him than _I'm sorry_ , one that would mean more to Megamind. He'd heard him describe what they did as a game often enough.

"You win," he said. And it worked. The smirk turned back into a smile. Megamind stepped forward and shook hands with him. The crowd ree'ed.

###

The room assigned to Megamind and Roxanne was about three times the size of the one in Harolup High Orbit. All the furniture could be left unfolded at once and there was still room to walk around. Other than that, it was a basic Tseri#uu couple's room: the niche for Minion's suit in one corner next to a trapdoor in the floor that opened on the water of the big central tank; the dividers that would extend from the ceiling to create smaller soundproofed compartments; the hammock strung across one corner; the inner door leading to the pool; the outer door leading to the corridor, although in this case the corridor was a veranda; its far wall was the sloping exterior of the dome, open (in good weather) to the outdoors. The weather was good most of the time. Given a choice of any place on the planet to build their first colony, the Tseri#uu had settled in the place with the most pleasant climate.

Wayne's room hung from the ceiling of the central dome, resembling a wasp's nest designed by cubists. Like his prison in space, it had been built especially for him, although this time the reason was not mistrust but simply that the ceilings of normal Tseri#uu personal rooms were too low for his height. The cleaning ring that descended out of the ceiling was specially adapted, too, for the width of his shoulders. The shaving and grooming equipment was adequate for his hair and beard, the hammock was extra long, and they'd apparently tailored the chair to his measurements. Best of all, the room had one curved wall that was just windows, which opened to the sky at a voice command, so he could fly straight out, just like from the balconies of the mansion where he'd grown up. It was darned thoughtful of them, he decided, to study his needs and preferences and set up the room in accordance with them. It also didn't have things he didn't need, particularly walk-out access to anything. Both the entrances were trapdoors, one down into the veranda-corridor around the outside of the dome, the other into the pool area. His room was only accessible by flying.

The one thing it didn't have that he missed was food. In the mansion, he'd had a small refrigerator in his bedroom so he wouldn't have to wake up someone on the staff if he wanted a midnight snack, and he'd found that so convenient that he'd put one the bedroom of his underground apartment. Here, he had to go down to the kitchen to get a snack, and he was expected to show up three times a day for the nudist banquet that was Tseri#uu mealtime. And that was a problem because Wayne was sharply aware of how different he looked from the other diners. The Yi#vi men were all built along the same lines as Megamind: not only blue and bald, but rail-thin and as modestly endowed in the body-hair department as the women. Wayne's nickname in boarding school, never spoken to his face, was "the gorilla", and that's how he suspected the Tseri#uu must see him: as some kind of primitive life form, something that belonged in a zoo.

"Couldn't I just eat up here?" he asked Nayung's hologram, which was hovering, suitless, over one of the trapdoors.

"This is the human body embarrassment thing, isn't it?" asked the Opuulu.

"How'd you know about that?"

"Well, even if we hadn't seen enough of Earth television to figure it out, we would have guessed from Roxanne's reactions. You should have seen her face when she found out what we think of privacy." Wayne could imagine it. He could also see, glancing through the wall, that she seemed to be over her initial reaction. She was down there already, one brown-topped pinkish-ivory body among the blue ones sitting at tables around the edges of the big pool, and she looked as comfortable, nude in the nude crowd, as if she'd been eating in settings like this her whole life. It was at her table that Nayung and Wayne were expected.

"What if I dive in and swim to the table underwater?" He'd be watched by lots of Opuulu, but somehow that didn't seem as intimidating.

"Ew, not good manners. The splash would swamp the tables. Besides, my little cousins down here want to see you fly. They'd be disappointed if you didn't."

Well, that made a difference. He didn't want to disappoint his public, even if that public was a few finned and scaled kids. If they were looking forward to seeing him soar through the dining room with his private parts (if he could still call them private here) flapping in the breeze, that's what he'd do. "Tell 'em to be watching. I'll be down as soon as I get undressed."

In fact, he needn't have worried. The Tseri#uu, having learned about the Glau at an early age, already knew what to expect. Those who remembered the Home Star Group, with its multiple intelligent species, reacted to the sight of him with nostalgia. Those born in space or on Harolup were curious. Megamind was still wallowing in his victory; Minion's mind was so preoccupied with his new Tseri#uu social life that Wayne kind of faded into the background for him. The one person who found him outlandish, ironically, was Roxanne. She'd seen Wayne in a bathing suit at pool parties at the mansion, so it wasn't as if she didn't know pretty much what to expect. Rather, it was her background of normalcy that had changed. Away from Earth, from the context of cities and superheroes and rescues, she saw him, for the first time, as the alien he was. As he floated down, feet first, to the empty place next to her, she wouldn't have been surprised if he had spoken to her in the Glau language, whatever that sounded like. Instead, he gave her his usual glinting smile and greeted her as if they were meeting at the KMCP studios for an interview, or at a social event.

"Hey, Roxie." His words snapped her out of her trance of amazement.

"Hey, Wayne. We sure are a long way from Metro City, aren't we?" It wasn't really a joke, but somehow it was so true that they couldn't help laughing. Everyone at the table joined in even though Tsveö and Naüÿng didn't really get it. After the usual pleasantries, Roxanne invited him to be her study partner.

"Studying what?" he asked.

"Well, its name translates 'underlying reality'. It's basically the more advanced physics and chemistry that everyone here learns when they're kids. Intensive study always goes better with a partner, and you're the only other person here who doesn't already know this stuff." Wayne didn't answer at first. He wanted to help, but physics had been one of his worst subjects and he really didn't want to subject himself to that again.

Tsveö spoke up. "Do you know how you fly? Do you know the physics behind any of your abilities? We do, and you should really consider finding out, now that you have a chance to."

"And when you meet your own people, you'll seem like less of a deepwater," added Naüÿng.

"A what?" asked Wayne.

"That sounds like it has some other meaning that literally deep water," said Roxanne. "It doesn't make any sense in English."

"Hick from the sticks," said Minion firmly. "That's how our folks used it."

"Are you sure?" asked Naüÿng. "The deep water dwellers were our own ancestors who had no language, so 'ape-man' would be a more accurate translation."

"But 'ape-man' is informed by the human experience of apes," responded Megamind. "So it has implications beyond simple ignorance. Poor hygiene, for instance, and impulsiveness and physical strength and a tendency to make choices based on instinct and emotion rather than thought. I don't recall _deepwater_ having any of those, well, maybe that last one can be implied, but the others?"

By that time, Wayne had checked out of the discussion. The thought of preparing to meet his own people had him racking his brains to remember whether the Glau language material in the computer system included actual lessons in speaking it. Suddenly, five years didn't seem very long at all.

  
  



	16. Chapter 16

The meal was just ending when an elderly Yi#vi swam up to their table. He seemed to have some sort of eyeglasses that consisted of bulging lenses attached directly to his skin all the way around. They were completely black inside, not with the texture of a black iris, but a featureless black as if they were all pupil, without iris or white. Surrounded by aliens, this one seemed to Roxanne the most alien of all.

"[Hello, everyone,]" he said. "[My name is Evodel Niuirn. Tsveö, would you please tell my story?]"

"[Sure,]" said Tsveö after translating. "Evodel Niuirn was the first person ever to set foot on Harolup. We'd sent probes before, but he was the first Explorer. That's actually what he would have been even if the Home Star Group hadn't been destroyed. He trained for it and he was on his way here. In a lot of ways, this colony owes its survival to him. Roxanne, you'll probably be working with him later on today, getting trained on the recording and sampling equipment that you'll be taking into the field." Everyone at the table greeted Niuirn.

"[Thank you, but I'm not here in my professional capacity. I am also a member of the Glau Study Group. There is a study group for each of the other peoples, working to maintain knowledge of it, and adding to that knowledge where we can. I am here to request that you, Wayne Scott, participate with us, answer questions and demonstrate your unique qualities. You may be the only Glau this generation of young people will ever meet.]"

When Tsveö finished translating (and Roxanne was pleased to find that she had followed it correctly in the original), Naüÿng added "That includes personal body stuff. Like, they'll probably want to ask questions during your medical exam."

Wayne had been about to give a cheerful "Yes, I'd be happy to," but then he remembered some of the really rude questions he sometimes got back on Earth, usually from boys. He looked around, wondering if anyone here would understand, then realized there was one person who probably would.

"Roxie, do you understand why I'm uncomfortable with this?" he asked. Tsveö translated for Niuirn, and kept on translating as the conversation went on in English.

She nodded. "Once I figured out how to get my messages, I got grilled about my biology."

"But were any of the questions, you know, nasty?" His volume dropped to a murmur, even though he knew everyone could hear him. "Like, remember that kid who asked me if I could stick my head up my own ass?" Minion laughed. Megamind tried to stop himself from laughing, thinking that it wouldn't look dignified, and failed; the laugh emerged as a snort. Tsveö and Naüÿng looked shocked, as did Niuirn when Tsveö, recovering himself after a moment, translated.

"I remember that kid," she replied, "and I've had that kind of questions thrown at me. Back on Earth, I mean. Here, no. People are just really curious." She frowned, thinking, during the translation. "Tsveö, Naüÿng, do people here ever ask a question, not because they want an answer, but to express some, ah, inappropriate emotion, like anger or lust?"

"Once in a while," said Naüÿng after translating and then replying in Tseri#uu. "But people having inappropriate emotions aren't just left to flounder here the way they are on Earth. Someone would intervene."

"So people wouldn't do it because they'd get grief for it," Wayne responded. Translation.

"Not grief, necessarily," Naüÿng replied, after giving Niuirn a very short response, as if the former explorer had already heard it. "Like, my friend Arvarvin. She's a couple of years older than me and when she reached puberty she started getting really aggressive. It's a biochemical thing. Some gene lines just have that potential. So they sent her and her Yi#vi to Second Seed and made her a hunter. Second Seed hasn't got the bugs worked out of their farming operation yet, so they still depend partly on hunting to get enough protein. And it's worked out pretty well. She likes hunting and she's getting good at it."

"It sounds like the odds of Wayne getting that kind of a question are pretty small," Roxanne concluded. Translation.

"Very small." Translation.

"Okay," said Wayne. "Tell him I'll do it." Translation.

"[Thank you,]" said Niuirn. "[This has been a very interesting conversation.]" Before the translation was over, he turned to go.

Megamind spoke. "[One more thing, if you don't mind.]" Naüÿng translated. "[I have never before seen optical prostheses permanently attached to a person's face, if they are prostheses and not equipment for augmentation of normal eyesight. Would you mind telling us about them?]"

"[Oh. I don't mind at all. These are prostheses, made by cannibalizing lenses and circuitry from secondary and spare equipment.]" Translation. "[They were made for me after my natural eyes were destroyed by a member (the first member ever encountered by the Paired Peoples) of the species that is now officially known as Evodel's Acid Squirter.]" Translation. "[The acid produced is a strong hydrochloric, quite useful. One of my jobs now is maintaining a population of them in confinement and harvesting the acid.]" Translation. "[Wrist unit, show a domestic Evodel's Acid Squirter producing.]" A hologram appeared of a round, ungainly creature like the missing link between toads and lizards, about as large as one of Wayne's fists, striped in dull orange and green, with a growth on its head that looked a bit like a tiny medieval jester's cap, without the bells. As they watched, the growth aimed and squirted. The acid flew until it struck something that hadn't been there until that moment: a nearly round oval of grey-brown color, slightly larger than the creature itself, with two black spots placed to represent eyes, if this oval were a face. The acid hit in a line that crossed both eyes, then ran quickly down into a finger-wide trough and flowed away. "[Each of them can do that twice a day, when it's well fed, and we make sure they are. Yield is about twelve iei[squish]i per day per animal.]" Twelve iei[squish]i was determined to be about fifty mililiters, a little more than three tablespoons.

"[So you have achieved complete domination over your nemesis,]" concluded Megamind. The old Yi#vi laughed.

"[Yes.]" And then in a fair imitation of Megamind's voice, he added in English, "My brilliant plan has ultimately succeeded. I have revahnge!"

* * *

As soon as Megamind and Roxanne were back in their room, there was a knock on the door. The outer door, the one that led to the hallway.

Roxanne, oddly, had a moment of panic. Someone was at the door and she was naked! Intellectually, she knew that opening the outer door while naked was perfectly acceptable here and, in fact, the polite thing to do, but the urge to cover herself was overwhelming. Megamind's hand was already on the door handle. The only thing she could think to do was to plop herself into her chair, which put her sideways to the door, and draw one knee, the one nearest the door, up to her chest, resting her heel on the seat and wrapping her arms loosely around it. She was still appropriately naked, but nothing was visible that would have been concealed by a string bikini.

At the door was a blue teenage girl in a strangely Earth-like outfit: long, loose trousers, a loose hip-length vest and a bag like a bicycle messenger's bag but about six times larger, slung diagonally, all a dull light brown. Shoes or boots of the same color, with greenish black soles, were just visible under the trousers.

"Hi," she said as she stepped inside, and that was all the English she attempted. "[My name is Eëx Ãhädl and I work in Central Supply. I'm here to bring you your regular work clothes.]" While Megamind asked Roxanne if she needed a translation and Roxanne assured him that she didn't, Ãhädl stepped inside, reached into her bag and began pulling out more light brown cloth. The fabric was a canvas type, like denim. Megamind closed the door after her and Roxanne stood up, much more relaxed now that the initial moment was over and the visitor was female.

Out of the bag came two outfits exactly like Ãhädl's, plus sleeves that attached to the vests with buttons made of some little flat seed. The fabric (which had a kind of irregular color, like old-fashioned grey sweat pants) was of double thickness on the front of the vest, with pleats and cuts and seams creating multiple pockets like a fisherman's vest.

"[Made from a local plant fiber?]" Megamind guessed as they put their new outfits on. Ãhädl gave the name of the plant and a hologram of it appeared on a nearby wall. The couple from Earth were amused at its close resemblance to marijuana. The trousers had drawstring waists, not much need for fitting, but the measurements that mattered, the shoulder and hip widths and leg lengths, fit perfectly. So did the hazard-orange hard-toed boots that came out of the bottom of the bag. Roxanne had a moment of wonder at that, then realized that their measurements would have been in their medical reports, which the whole colony had access to. The hems of the trousers also had drawstrings so they could be drawn tight against the uppers of the boots. _Yeah, there are insects here._

As soon as Ãhädl was gone, they checked their calendars. Roxanne would be getting trained on the recording and sampling equipment that she'd be taking into the field, and practicing by using them to check some of the crop plants for signs of disease, so she was to meet Niuirn in one of the agricultural bays. Megamind would be going to the colony's machine shop to assemble the first brainbot body.

"[I'm assuming that Minion will be assisting me. Where is that fish? Wrist unit, show me Ilu Amnang and request conversation.]" A hologram of Minion, suitless in open water, appeared next to the empty gorilla suit.

"[Yes, conversation]," said the piscene, then switched into English. "Wow, those are some ugly outfits."

"Practical, Minion," Megamind replied. "This design is obviously the optimal balance among simplicity of construction, functionality, durability and the limitations of the material."

"Yeah, but they're so plain! You gotta let me nice 'em up as soon as we get a break."

"Maybe," said Roxanne, "you should check on whether customizing work clothes is socially acceptable. [Wrist unit, what percentage of the work clothes currently worn at First Seed have had, um, pause] honey, what's the word for ornamental, or decorative or something like that?" Megamind provided it. "[Resume, have had ornamental modifications?]"

"[Twenty-eight point four percent.]"

"See?" said Minion. "[Wrist unit, select at random and display six views of work clothes with ornamental modifications currently being worn.]"

At the sight of the half-dozen holograms that appeared around the room, the Opuluu's expression changed to dismay. All the Yi#velit wearing ornamented work clothes were kids. There was one of a group of six or seven little ones in what appeared to be a classroom, but all the others showed kids at work: maintaining machines, helping in the kitchen, picking bugs off crops. Several were in a tree, wearing hazard orange harnesses attached by ropes of the same color to its limbs, harvesting small teardrop-shaped red fruit. The modifications seemed limited to drawings on the cloth, in only a few colors (hazard orange was strongly represented), and natural items such as feathers and shells, tied on. They all looked like they might have been done by the children themselves. "Huh," he reacted. "[Wrist unit, are there any formal or informal rules about the decoration of work clothes?]"

In the air in front of the holograms, the words appeared: "[No formal rules exist. Questions about informal rules require consultation. Please wait.]"

"[If it's calling U[click]hani Vöhryeh,]" said Megamind, "[there will be an extra minute or two of delay. She's in orbit. Menang, why aren't you suiting up to come and help me in the workshop?]"

"[I'm not going to be there with you, sir. I'll be in the lake, working out the first task.]"

"[Oh. Well, I hope I'll have someone to assist me. Maybe I sh-]" The holograms of the kids all shrank and moved aside as one of U[click]hani Vöhryeh, now dressed (in a white jumpsuit like many they'd seen in Harolup High Orbit) and measuring some liquid in a lab, appeared in the center.

"[Hello, Menang, Amnang, Roxanne. What is your question?]"

Minion replied. "[We see children with decorated work clothes but not adults. Is there a rule about that?]"

There was a long pause before she reacted, a result of the ground-to-orbit transmission time."[Children will decorate any surface they're allowed to, and we encourage that. It help develop aesthetic perception, initiative, and so forth. For adults, it's regarded as inappropriately frivolous.]"

"[So there's no such thing as clothing style? Wait. That can't be right. We saw a lot of style variety at our arrival dance. Is it just clothes for work that are supposed to be plain?]"

Long pause. "[Yes. Exactly.]"

"[Huh. Well... listen, do you think maybe that could change once the colony gets a little more secure?]"

Long pause. "[Why, Menang, it sounds like you're very attached to this idea.]"

"[I'm a designer. Back on Earth, I designed and made all our outfits. The only time either of us would even think of going out in public in something this plain and ordinary would be for a disguise. When we're going out as ourselves, presentation is important. I just can't believe my Yi#vi is going out there in, well, stuff that looks like it's made out of the bags that seeds are shipped in, on Earth.]" (Roxanne failed to follow this and asked for help. There was a pause for translation.)

Long pause. "[Our own ages of mass production and mass population were like that. Personal style was used to express identity and stand out in the crowd. But now we're in a different kind of age, an age when everyone is known and nearly everything is hand-crafted. It is our work and our interpersonal behavior that speak for us now. Personal style will not die out, but its place is in our ceremonial and recreational garments.]" Once again, Roxanne asked for translation. When it was done, she had a question.

"[Vöhryeh, you're talking about the present like this is just another age, like being reduced to a little tiny group of survivors is almost...] Honey, I need an expression like 'par for the course'."

"Meaning the sort of difficulty that is to be expected, taken in stride, that sort of thing?" asked Megamind. She nodded. "How about -"

Vöhryeh interrupted. "[This is not the first time our civilization has been very nearly wiped out and had to begin again from remnants. I wouldn't go so far as to say we're used to it, but we know what to do. And one of the things we know to do is to remember that work, in this age, is not a matter for individuality. We do not work to express ourselves. We work for the survival and restoration of our culture, of the Paired Peoples. The clothes we wear for work reflect that. Do you understand?]"

* * *

Ãdi[click]ose Likchel, the Yi#vi in charge of the machine shop at First Seed was the oldest one they had seen yet. His white eyebrows bristled and he had hair in his ears like some old human men get. He was also missing two fingers from his right hand.

"[Been wanting to set this place in order for years now, but the colony could never spare the ten or twenty days of labor it would take,]" he said to Wayne through Naüÿng. "[Now you can do it in a day.]" So the former hero, still wearing his Metro Man costume, flew around the place, moving machinery and tools and supplies at the old guy's instructions. Every once in a while, he'd be interrupted by Megamind, who was the center of a little group of observers, about half of them hologrammed in from Second Seed or Harolup High Orbit. The former villain, working at a counter, would call for something in Tseri#uu. Naüÿng translated, but Wayne stopped bothering to listen because the system would highlight the object itself, putting a layer of blue glow on it if it was visible, a ball of lavender or pink on whatever was on top of it if it wasn't. He didn't need to know what it was called to fetch it.

The thing Megamind was working on was a lakebot body. The lakebots were a type of brainbot that swam rather than flew, very much in demand for the colony's extensive underwater farms. This would be the first of the brainbot cores to be given a new body made on Harolup. The assembly process was being closely studied so that mass production could be initiated as soon as possible.

Wayne had expected that, the first time he had to take orders from Megamind, his old rival would use the opportunity to tease, humiliate and generally assert dominance over him. That is, in fact, what Megamind had planned to do - but not while he had the attention of, literally, every engineer in the world. Knowing that his own engineering skills, self-taught and based on Earth technology, were in many ways horribly behind those of his audience, he had made up his mind to behave with a far greater degree of dignity and professionalism than came naturally to him, in the hope that this would help him win a little more respect. He didn't say "Please" to Wayne when he wanted something. He wouldn't go that far. Instead, he was terse and efficient, calling out the name of the thing he needed next in the fewest possible words. Sometimes he didn't know the name in Tseri#uu, but after he described it to his audience, someone would figure it out. Most of the tools provided for him were blessedly intuitive in their use, and assembly went smoothly, though there were long pauses when something had to be made.

It was that way with the exterior casing. The shop manager provided a sheet of the plasticine material used to make external casings for underwater equipment of all sorts. There was no mold suitable for the vacuum-casting process normally used to shape it, but the old Yi#vi advised him that Glau strength was a more than adequate substitute. Megamind ended up sculpting the desired shape out of plain clay from a local river bank, and Wayne massaged the plasticine into a shape that matched. The color of the material was an orange close to that of prison jumpsuits back in Metro City, an irony that wasn't lost on him. Then Megamind marked circles where the holes for the arms, lights and sensors should be and guided Wayne's head and hands so his laser vision could burn those holes at just the right angles. Then Wayne went back to moving things for Likchel while Megamind drew the core out of the suspension medium it had been transported in, then carefully fitted it into its housing, mating each of its axons to a hair-thin conductor wire, and sealed the unit. While it gradually woke up from its artificial hybernation, he performed the final assembly.

Once that last bit was done, Likchel, through Naüÿng, called Wayne to come and watch as the newly awakened bot was lowered into the testing tank at the end of the counter. The former hero felt a strange kind of nostalgia as he watched it move in the water. Back on Earth, the sight of an active lakebot was a cause for apprehension because it meant another evil plot was afoot, but this was a lakebot turned, like its maker, to good.

It came to the surface and bowged at Megamind.

"That's a good little cyborg," he said, then switched to Tseri#uu. "[Are you interfaced with the system?]"

It bobbed its orange body in a nod as Naüÿng translated the first bit.

"[Good. Now stretch your arms out to your sides. Flash your light red. Now white. Now yellow. Now blue. Now scrutinize your surroundings and send them to the system.]" The little bot complied without comment until the last sentence. When it turned its snaking lens eye over its own back to look behind it, it bobbed, startled, and let out a few more bowgs. The view through its lens appeared projected on a nearby wall, with text over it Tseri#uu. Naüÿng translated it: "Daddy! Why am I orange?"

"[You get a new color for our new lake,]" he replied. "[Minion will explain. Go down to the far end and push the dark spot. It's the button that opens the tunnel to the lake. Go through it and meet Minion.]"

The orange cyborg did as instructed. A square hole opened beneath it. With his X-ray vision Wayne could see that the hole was, indeed, the entrance to a water-filled tunnel that dropped about five yards, then went all the way out past the shore. The little bot plunged in. About half a minute later, a hologram came up showing it next to Minion, another Opuulu and a rack of tools under the water. Behind them was a tall stand of some underwater vegetable. Minion gave the bot a few more instructions. It took a scissors and a net bag from the tool rack, moved back to the first row of water plants and began pruning. There was ree'ing, not only in the machine shop, but from all over First Seed.

  
  



End file.
